BurmillaOS for ARM64 ?

[CCO19]

Hello,

Regretting the end of support for RancherOS, I was delighted to find this distribution before realizing that it might not be maintained either.

My need with this OS is for an ultra-light and reliable OS to run my containers on extremely lightweight on-premises infrastructures.

My concern with Flatcar Container Linux? It's K8S-oriented, and I doubt it's as lightweight as BurmillaOS.

What's still missing with BurmillaOS? I'd like to use it on headless ARM64 clusters.

I don't know if this can breathe new life into BurmillaOS at the community level, but it's important to know that ARM64 architectures are increasingly used, particularly in businesses, and BurmillaOS seems perfectly suited for these projects where frugality is paramount.

[olljanat]

Which ARM64 platform(s) and CPU versions you are looking for to use?

RancherOS had some kind of support for Raspberry Pi 3B. BurmillaOS had support for Raspberry Pi 4B still in v2.0.0-beta4 but I dropped it because there is no real usage or anyone maintaining it.

To be able build more generic ARM64 version we would need:

• update this kernel config.
• remove exceptions like this from code which was there because installation process to Raspberry Pi was different
  

  os/cmd/control/os.go

  Lines 197 to 199 in 29a661b

  	if runtime.GOARCH != "amd64" {
  	log.Fatalf("ros install / upgrade only supported on 'amd64', not '%s'", runtime.GOARCH)
  	}

As mentioned in #186 main challenge even with longterm support for AMD64 work needed to upgrade kernel config so if you or someone does that, I will be happy to merge those. And it can be ARM64 only first.

[CCO19]

Thanks for your feedback!

These are rather exotic headless platforms based on a Marvell Aramada 8040 SoC, 16GB RAM and featuring 4 SATA III ports. They run (among other things) a Qemu hypervisor on which we install 1 or 2 virtual servers (currently running AlmaLinux). We tested Alpine for more frugality, especially concerning compute, but it complicated things quite a bit.

I've just checked out Faltcar, which isn't natively supported either.

[olljanat]

Those are some kind of IoT devices? Are those publicly available somewhere?

If you are planning to do some larger scale deployment and someone is willing to pay the work or at least part of it then I can add support for those devices.

BurmillaOS has always been partly hobby and partly work project for me.

[CCO19]

No, it's more like an ARM64 NAS designed for innovation. In short, it's for tinkering with low-cost solutions that can't be industrialized because demand is too limited, specific and scalable.

Of course, if I'm the only applicant, there's no point. I'm just putting the idea forward in case others see a use for it too.

Thanks in any case for taking the time to read the suggestions :)

[olljanat]

Ah, OK but the challenge here is that BurmillaOS does not need more users, it needs more maintainers/contributors to become long living open source project.