Ampere is a Arm64 CPU manufacturer, focusing on hyper converged cloud infrastructure. There are 2 main CPUs publically available:
These servers are based on the Ampere eMAG chipset. The initial bring-up work is complete, and they are well supported from 13.0-RELEASE onwards. A number of FreeBSD developers have these systems, and Ampere has generously contributed further servers to the FreeBSD Foundation, destined for build & development clusters.
FreeBSD has full support from 13.0-RELEASE and further improvements are in development. If you have questions, please ask on the freebsd-arm@ mailing list.
Install from USB as per normal. The installer should run without change via the platform's remote console, so long as you plug in both the management & the normal ethernet ports.
Use either mini memstick or any of the default images (i.e. not rock64, rasbpi etc).
- lots of stuff
- temperature / sensors - cpu frequency - fan control - ipmi ??
To boot to ZFS you will need to specify additional loader parameters:
# /boot/loader.conf kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0" kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="0" #storage bits opensolaris_load="YES" zfs_load="YES" cryptodev_load="YES" # use CAM device on intel NVMe driver hw.nvme.use_nvd=0 # filesystems xz_load="YES" tmpfs_load="YES" # network linuxkpi_load="YES" mlx5_load="YES" mlx5en_load="YES" mlxfw_load="YES" # serial over ipmi autoboot_delay="3" beastie_disable="YES" boot_multicons="YES" boot_serial="YES" console="efi"