This is the last regular edition of the Works on Arm News for 2017. Thanks all for your contributions and reports over the course of the year.

The next special edition for 2018 will be a “year in review”, due to be published the first week of 2018.

In this issue

• Video: Ed Vielmetti interview by Charbax at Linaro Connect
• Video: Ed Vielmetti presentation at Mesoscon
• Video: ARM HPC Workshop at Riken AICS (Linaro)
• Nix installer for arm64 (Graham Christensen)
• KVM/ARM for Linux kernel v4.15 (Christoffer Dall, Linaro)
• QEMU 2.11.0 and 2.10.2 releases
• Xen 4.10 (via Stefano Stabellini)
• Go 1.10 beta 1 (Andrew Bonventure)
• Upcoming events calendar and calls for papers

Video: Ed Vielmetti interview by Charbax at Linaro Connect

Charbax (Nicolas Charbonnier) is a video blogger who produces original video and news contents about ARM Powered devices, mostly from trade shows and conferences around the world. I had a chance to catch up with him at Linaro Connect in San Francisco (SFO17).

Interview with Ed Vielmetti, Special Projects Director at http://Packet.net talking about their available and upcoming ARMv8 servers in the data center and the ARM Server ecosystem that is being advanced at a rapid pace.

• http://armdevices.net/2017/11/30/vielmetti-talks-arm-servers-at-packet-net-and-worksonarm/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq7J72p_2po
• http://armdevices.net/
• https://twitter.com/Charbax

Video: Ed Vielmetti presentation at Mesoscon

Ed was at Mesoscon in September 2017 giving this presentation on Mesos and the Arm ecosystem. The talk predates Qualcomm’s announcement of their Centriq 2400 “Amberwing” processor and talks through the process of porting Mesos to Arm servers.

“One Ring to Bind Them” – Packet, Qualcomm, & Mesos: A Window into the Development of the Armv8 Ecosystem – Ed Vielmetti, Packet

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-zfRYBY83Y
• https://mesosconna17.sched.com/event/C8QN/one-ring-to-bind-them-packet-qualcomm-mesos-a-window-into-the-development-of-the-armv8-ecosystem-ed-vielmetti-packet
• https://schd.ws/hosted_files/mesosconna17/78/MesosCon%202017%20-%20One%20Ring%20to%20Rule%20them%20All.pdf

Video: ARM HPC Workshop at Riken AICS (Linaro)

The Arm HPC Workshop brought together the leading Arm vendors, end users and the open source development community in Tokyo, to discuss the latest products, developments and open source software support. Topics included

• Compilers including GCC, LLVM, C++, Fortran, optimizations, benchmarking and general support
• OS and Runtime
• Tools
• Math Libraries
• Orchestration
• Machine Learning

Recordings and slides from the workshop sessions of December 12-13 2017 are now online.

• https://www.linaro.org/events/armhpcjapan2017/

Nix installer for arm64 (Graham Christensen)

Nix is a purely functional package manager for Linux that was developed as part of the NixOS operating system but that can be run on other Linux distributions like Ubuntu or CentOS. Its unique approach allows for reproducible builds of packages even in the face of conflicting dependencies within an operating system.

The Nix installer now works on arm64 (aarch64) systems through the command line below:

you can now curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | bash on aarch64 and get Nix

• https://nixos.org/
• https://nixos.org/nix/

KVM/ARM for Linux kernel v4.15 (Christoffer Dall, Linaro)

KVM is the “Kernel Virtual Machine”, a virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor. This is part of mainline Linux, and there’s an active project out of Columbia University led by Christoffer Dall at Linaro maintaining KVM for Arm.

On December 4, 2017, a set of updates were posted for KVM on Arm for the v4.15 kernel. Several of these were prompted by a static code analysis done with SMATCH, a code-checking tool from Oracle Linux kernel engineer Dan Carpenter.

• https://www.linux-kvm.org/
• http://worksonarm.com/explore/kvm
• https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/kvmarm
• https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/pipermail/kvmarm/2017-December/028704.html
• https://lwn.net/Articles/691882/
• https://blogs.oracle.com/linuxkernel/smatch-static-analysis-tool-overview,-by-dan-carpenter
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSiVXMxG6GM (SMATCH video)

QEMU 2.11.0 and 2.10.2 releases

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. Two new releases are out in December 2017, 2.11.0 (December 13) and 2.10.2 (December 18).

QEMU is often used in close combination with KVM and Xen. The relevant changes in the change logs are as follows:

• in QEMU 2.10.2, “Supports for combining the userspace GIC with KVM timers, so that KVM can be used on the Raspberry Pi 3.”
• in QEMU 2.11.0, “AArch64 CPU EL2 emulation should now be good enough to run Xen as a guest”

Get QEMU from http://qemu.org or install from your favorite distribution, noting these updates.

• https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/2.10#ARM
• https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/2.11#ARM
• https://www.qemu.org/blog/
• http://worksonarm.com/explore/qemu

Xen 4.10 (via Stefano Stabellini)

Xen is a hypervisor for Linux. It supports multiple guest operating systems, including Linux, Windows, NetBSD, FreeBSD.

The latest 4.10 version of Xen adds support for SoCs based on the 64-bit Armv8-A architecture from Qualcomm Centriq 2400 and Cavium ThunderX. In addition, it adds SBSA UART emulation through command line tools, Interrupt Translation Service (ITS) support for the GICv3 interrupt controller, and GRUB2 support. 4.10.0 was released on December 5, 2017, and has support through June 2020.

• https://www.xenproject.org/
• http://worksonarm.com/explore/xen
• https://blog.xenproject.org/2017/12/12/whats-new-in-the-xen-project-hypervisor-4-10/
• https://twitter.com/stabellinist/status/941401234933723147

Go 1.10 beta 1 (Andrew Bonventure)

On December 7, 2017, the Go project released go1.10beta1, a beta version of Go 1.10. You are encouraged to download and test this release. There are no known problems or regressions, and it is anticipated that due to changes incorporated during the 1.10 release cycle that there will be performance improvements on Arm.

For the ARM 64-bit port, the assembler now supports the VADD, VADDP, VADDV, VAND, VCMEQ, VDUP, VEOR, VLD1, VMOV, VMOVI, VMOVS, VORR, VREV32, and VST1 instructions.

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-announce/Zc6kgP2VzhY
• https://beta.golang.org/doc/go1.10
• http://golang.org
• http://worksonarm.com/explore/golang

Upcoming events calendar and calls for papers

Plan your 2018 travel and conference schedule.

KubeCon EU 2018 is May 2 – 4, 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The call for papers is open until January 12, 2018.

• https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe-2018/program/cfp/

DockerCon 2018 is June 12-14, 2018 in San Francisco, CA. The call for papers is open until January 18, 2018.

• https://blog.docker.com/2017/12/dockercon-cfp/
• https://2018.dockercon.com/

OSCon (“Open Source Convention”) is July 16-19, 2018 in Portland, OR. The call for participation is open until January 30, 2018.

• https://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/oscon-or