FreeBSD on AWS Graviton (t4g)

[Colin Percival]

On 12/20/20 10:04 AM, Rafal Lukawiecki via freebsd-cloud wrote:
> Has anyone got any experience running FreeBSD 12 on AWS Graviton instances like t4g? I am considering switching from t3 due to what seems like a better sticker price. Any warnings?

Things mostly work.  The remaining issues are:

* The EC2 API "shutdown" / "reboot" message is sent via a pl061 GPIO device
and we're dropping it on the floor; consequently "reboot" does nothing at
all, while "shutdown" does nothing until EC2 times out and does a hard
poweroff (without filesystems being unmounted etc).

* Device hotplug doesn't work (ACPI issues?) so you need to manually rescan
after attaching new disks.

* FreeBSD doesn't boot on "bare metal" Graviton instances, due to missing
some drivers.  (NetBSD works though -- anyone want to port their code?)

Oh, and a generic ARM issue: It's not a Tier 1 platform yet, so freebsd-update
doesn't work and packages aren't always as up-to-date as on x86.  But I think
those are being worked on...

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid