ESXi-Arm Fling 1.10 Refresh

Today we released a new refresh to the ESXi-Arm Fling.

Upgrade support

Compared to previous Fling refreshes, upgrade is NOW supported from earlier ESXi-Arm 1.x Fling releases. This should make upgrading your evaluation environments a simpler proposition.

Improved virtualization

• Use VMXNET3 as the default NIC for FreeBSD 12.
• Use PVSCSI as the default HBA for FreeBSD 12.
• Ignore accesses to unknown ID registers for improved compatibility with Linux guests.

Host support improvements

Ampere eMAG:

• Report L3 cache info.

PINE64 Quartz64 and other RK3566 SBCs:

• PCIe support (NVMe not supported at this time).
• EQOS obnoard 1G NIC support.

PCIe:

• Support for DEN0115 firmware interface for configuration space access.
  • This is an interface for improved compatibility between ACPI operating systems and non-server Arm hosts.
  • Tested with the latest Raspberry Pi firmware on Pi 400.
• Improvements to Intel igbn NIC driver stability, e.g. for Intel I210/I211/I350 NICs.
• Support for non-cache coherent PCIe Root Complexes (e.g. for Raspberry Pi, Pine64 Quartz64)

Miscellaneous:

• Improvements to non-cache coherent DMA support (e.g. for Raspberry Pi, PINE64 Quartz64)
• Raspberry Pi GENET NIC statistics support

Telemetry

The ESXi-Arm Fling now reports some telemetry information to VMware. This is done to best gauge interest in specific use-case scenarios, hardware platforms and I/O devices.

No PII is collected.

What is collected?

• CPU info: core count, NUMA, manufacturer, etc.
• Firmware info: vendor, version.
• Platform info: vendor, product, UUID, PCI device list.
• ESXi-Arm info: version, patch level, product build

The telemetry code is in /bin/telemetry. It runs once on boot and as a a cron job at 00:00 every Saturday.

What systems does the Fling support?

• Datacenter and Cloud
  • Ampere Computer eMAG-based systems.
  • Ampere Computing Altra-based systems.
  • Arm Neoverse N1 System Development Platform.
• Edge.
  • SolidRun Honeycomb LX2 (and other LX2160-based systems).
  • SolidRun MacchiatoBin or CN9132 EVB (and other similar platforms based on CN91xx or Armada A80x0/A70x0).
  • Marvell Octeon TX2 CN92xx/CN93xx/CN95xx/CN96xx/CN98xx platforms
  • NVIDIA Jetson Xavier AGX and NX Developer Kits.
  • NXP LS1046A-based Freeway and RDB systems.
  • Socionext SynQuacer Developerbox.
  • Raspberry Pi 4B (4GiB, 8GiB and Pi 400)
  • PINE64 Quartz64 Model A and other RK3566-based SBCs.

This is not a hard list. Other systems compliant (or close enough) to SystemReady ES and SystemReady SR standards may be operational in some manner. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• Qemu emulation
• Cavium/Marvell ThunderX (CN88xx)-based systems.
• Cavium/Marvell ThunderX2-based systems.
• Qualcomm Centriq-based systems.
• AMD Opteron A1100-based systems.
• Applied Micro X-Gene1-based systems.

…many of these are of historical interest by now, but may still be functional enough.