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.
