When it come to ARM Servers one thing that everyone agrees is that the new 64 bit architecture, introduced in ARMv8, will be a significant milestone for this market.
It seems that 14.04 LTS will be a big release for ARM Servers, as it is likely to be the first Long Term Support with ARMv8. However, the road to 14.04 starts now!
The first set of ARMv8 licensees are starting to be announced, so it is time to get Ubuntu ready for hardware bring up. What better place to start that with an ARMv8 kernel? and that is what Jeremy Kerr from Canonical has just published.
As he says: “Most of the components of the 64-bit ARM toolchain have been released, so I’ve put together some details on building a cross compiler for aarch64. At present, this is only binutils & compiler (ie, no libc), so is probably not useful for applications. However, I have a 64-bit ARM kernel building without any trouble.”
If you want to find out more about Jeremy’s work, see:
- Basic ARM64 toolchain - Steps and Git tree
- ARM64 Kernel – Instructions and images
With the test kernel builds, we’re able to start low-level testing of ARMv8 hardware as soon as they become available. So, we are ready for ARMv8 hardware bring up, Are you?
