Ampere’s Commitment to Enabling Open Source Developers

 

Ampere is committed to enabling Aarch64 as a server platform and removing the barrier-to-entry for server based Aarch64 development within open-source project ecosystems. By contributing our Aarch64 platforms to projects, organizations, technology stakeholders, and by engaging in strategic partnerships with the projects themselves, we can help enable and ensure packages and binary artifacts are compiled natively on Aarch64 server platforms for Aarch64 architectures without using cross compilation.   Ampere is committed to ensuring Open source developers have a choice and can request access to Ampere Aarch64 platforms through one of our open source hosting partner providers:


Equinix Metal

  • A commercial baremetal cloud infrastructure provider supporting Ampere compute platforms for several years.
  • Provides Ampere resources to OpenSource projects through WorksOnArm, CNCF CI and other OSS initiatives.

 

Oregon State University Open Source Labs

  • One of the original open source hosting providers with 27 years providing open source infrastructure hosting​ across multiple compute Architectures 
  • 160 Projects hosted (… Apache, Linux Foundation, Drupal)​ 

 

FoSSHost.org/Aarch64.com​ 

  • A relatively new and quickly growing pure play open source hosting provider. 
  • Provides datacenter infrastructure and services to support open source projects 

Software Development Environment

Ampere Altra Linux Kernel Porting Guide

Information regarding Linux Kernel features and patches that apply to Ampere SOCs: 

Linux Kernel Patch Guide 

Ampere Patch Tree

 

Ampere® Altra®:

OS

Recommended Minimal Version
AlmaLinux >= 8.4
Debian 11
Oracle Linux 8.3 UEK R6
RedHat (RHEL) >= 8.4
Rocky Linux >= 8.4
SUSE (SLES) 15 SP2
Ubuntu LTS HWE 20.04.02

 

Ampere® eMAG®:

OS

Recommended Minimal Version
CentOS >= 7.5
Fedora >= 27
Oracle Linux >= 7.5
RedHat (RHEL) >= 7.5
SUSE Linux >= 15
Ubuntu LTS HWE >= 18.04.01

 

Compilers and Tools:

The new Ampere Gcc 8.4 and 9.3 compilers have the latest bug fixes and support for Ampere® Altra® processors. These compilers will default to targeting the Ampere Altra processor (mcpu=neoverse-n1), supporting the new instructions and tuning for the microarchitecture.

The ‘sysroot’ compilers provide a set of optimized libraries in the `.tar.gz` archive: these can be linked statically with your program or are available for dynamically linked executable with a custom library search path. The ‘nosysroot’ compiler is intended to build binaries that use the libraries on the system you are running on in the system search path—it acts as a drop-in replacement for your system compiler.

If you’re looking for the best performance, try the ‘-Ofast’ (highest optimization setting) and ‘-flto’ (link-time optimizations) options.

For Linux aarch64 hosted compilers and tools:

9.3.0:

8.4.0:

8.3.0:

8.2.0:

7.3.0:

 

For Linux x86-64 hosted cross-compilers and tools targeting aarch64:

9.3.0:

8.4.0:

8.3.0:

8.2.0:

7.3.0:

Helpful Guides:

 

 

Open Source Community Mentions