HEADS UP: Cavium ThunderX support in the tree

[Zbigniew Bodek]

Hello all,

Semihalf is happy to officially announce that starting from SVN
revision r289550 FreeBSD is ready to run on Cavium ThunderX
system-on-chip!
ThunderX is the first ARM64 (ARMv8) hardware platform to be supported
by FreeBSD and the only one that introduces 96-CPU cores SMP.
The integrated code includes support for:

- Single and dual-socket operation (48 and 96 CPUs)
- PCI Express
- SATA
- Network Interface Controller (VNIC) 1/10/40G
- Other required drivers (GICv3, Interrupt Translation Services)

There is still some polishing and optimizations to be done but the
system can be used as is in 11-CURRENT and will work as briefly shown
on this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q5aDEt18mw

This would not be possible without all great work of the following
people at Semihalf:
Dominik Ermel
Wojciech Macek
Michal Mazur
Tomasz Nowicki
Michal Stanek
Zbigniew Bodek

Special thanks go to:
ARM, Cavium and the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring this work.
Ed Maste (The FreeBSD Foundation) for all the help and project management.
Andrew Turner for technical input and numerous code reviews.
Andy Wafaa (ARM), Prasun Kapoor and Larry Wikelius (Cavium) for their
support and help with the hardware.
Rafal Jaworowski (Semihalf) for putting this project together.


PS. You may also be interested in checking out our entry on ARM
community blog about this work:
https://community.arm.com/groups/processors/blog/2015/10/27/semihalfs-arm64-blog-1-the-freebsd-on-the-96-cpu-armv8-soc