I saw in the meeting notes for the March 2nd, 2020 Monthly Telephone Conference that testers are needed for ARM64 devices. What devices are ARM64?
The only device that I have that may be close is a Raspberry Pi 4B (or maybe a Raspberry Pi 3B+). Will this work?
where have you found this?
We need more usefull testfeedback but at the moment not for arm64.
The āarm64 builder upgradeā was a topic that we want to test larger instances of our nightly builders (that was more expensive)
At the moment IPFire aarch64 supports only RPi 3B, 3B+ and some KVM instances
I am new to IPfire, I only know it is a linux based firewall OS. If it is making use of the same mainline kernel or even with some addition patches then I would be of some help in building and testing ipfire for some of the arm devices which I have.
Currently I am interested in add supporting for 2 device, as the hardware was designed with a view of it being a firewall appliance.
Is there any clear understanding on what is needed? Do you build all aarch64 package and have a repo for it ?
I can build its uboot and kernel with a working dtb in linux, I am one of the maintainer at Manjaro Linux Arm.
I do have few more Arm sbcās which I can use for testing and building packages. Please do let me know if I can be of any help.
Update: I found out how it is build and also nightly build rootfs image which I can re-use over the device specific boot partition. I am not sure if the kernel is present or not. I will try it on VM and also flash it on a drive to see what all is present in the image.
Hi Furkan,
I am not sure what to say to what is needed. That depends on the hardware. Hopefully not many patches to get our kernel to boot on it.
And yes, we build everything from source: wiki.ipfire.org - IPFire 2.x - Build Howto The build hoot requires that you have a working system of the target architecture.
It might be difficult to build our kernel outside of our build environment, but the user land will of course be the same and you can extract it from any of the nightly builds or release images.
Hello Michael,
I do and I am still going through the build process, I will try it myself and see how far I can reach with it until I have to ask for help.
I hate building aarch64 package using cross compiling as it takes alot of time.
Let us continue on the new thread.
Cheers.
That is the reason why we not cross compile it. We use a aarch64 vm at amazon which is faster than my ryzen5 for x86_64.
https://nightly.ipfire.org/next/2020-06-27%2014:34:22%20+0000-822d70e1/aarch64/build.log
Yes, I do build packages natively on Khadas Vim3 or Edge-V and it will take few hours to do it.
Are you making use of the build server for hourly cost? Like do you create a new server before the build process and destroy it once done? Or it is always running for you to build whenever needed?
You can try packet.com which we use for build large packages like firefox browser and others.
They are continuously running m6g.xlarge instances and they are hosted with AWS.
Hi there,
is it really that simple to build IPFire for an aarch64 device as described in build how-to?
Would the image be able to be flashed through u-boot?
So it is feasible to port IPFire to an ARM Cortex-A72 (MarvellĀ® ARMADAĀ® 7040)?
There is a OpenWrt SNAPSHOT available for the Globalscale MOCHAbin (I do have a dev board).
Moreover, I have Debian and Ubuntu images for the Mochabin.
Yes As long have it have the drivers in kernel and the right device tree for the device.
Marvell Armada 7040 seems to have good support in kernel but idk about other chip drivers like network chip etc.
Currently I am looking for a hardware which is cheap and can support my use case of firewall appliance to replace my year old RockPiE on opnsense.
7050 is a good choice but am overkill for my use case. I might end up with NanoPiR4S.
Mochabin is on the expensive side compared to x86.
thx for updating me, that should all be there but Iām still not undecided if it shall be ipfire or openwrt as second would properly allow easier customized builds as a default build is available.
just out of curiosity, what x86 would you chose instead
The unbranded Intel devices with 4 Ethernet. Coz mochabin along with its case is almost similar to x86 devices while ipfire just works on x86 out of the box.
For arm you have to wait or compile stuff yourself to make it work.
Where can these be found?
Aliexpress for me.
Idk much about your region so i cannot say if the price will be the same.
may you share some examples 
I sit in central Eruopre
Something like this
Technically you do not need to build your own version, because you can download a ready compiled one. As long as you do not need to make any modifications to the image, this should boot fine on any system that supports EFI.
