Hi all, It's been a while.
This patch enables ACPI support for ARM64 which allows IPFire to boot on ARM "server" machines which use EFI/TianoCore to boot.
One such example is the QEMU arm64 "virt" machine with an EFI firmware - https://releases.linaro.org/reference-platform/enterprise/latest/uefi/
The arm64 images from "standard" distros (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/etc.) are designed to work with this EFI+ACPI combination.
There should be no regressions for any current arm64 hardware supported by IPFire - Linux will only use ACPI tables if present, if not fallback to device tree.
The use case for this is to run our hardware[1] using the muvirt[2] VM host, which also allows some "blending" of OpenWrt functions on the host, e.g the host can manage bridging of Ethernet ports and WiFi hostapd so IPFire can work with simple Ethernet interfaces for the Red/Green/Blue/Orange.
You can see the Fireinfo profile for the VM here - https://fireinfo.ipfire.org/profile/67aa9a9cff94f3ef8f61866197a57106ccdcea4b
I have successfully speedtested ~1Gbps though this virtualized setup so this should provide more than adequate performance for most situations.
It is not possible to run IPFire directly on our LS1088 (Ten64) platform at the moment as 4.14 does not have working Ethernet (DPAA2) and PCIe controller drivers. It is possible to backport them from later kernels (and I did have a go at this a few months ago) - but it is a very large patch (>1M lines) and that is before considering any of the features and fixes in more recent kernels (e.g backporting PHYLINK).
When IPFire moves to a newer kernel that would be a good time to revisit this.
[1] - https://traverse.com.au/products/ten64-networking-platform/ [2] - https://gitlab.com/traversetech/muvirt
Mathew McBride (1): kernel: enable ACPI support on ARM64
config/kernel/kernel.config.aarch64-ipfire | 99 +++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 96 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)