Working with Open Source

Ampere is designing the future of hyperscale cloud and edge computing with the world’s first cloud native processors. Built for the cloud with a modern 64-bit Arm server-based architecture, Ampere gives customers the freedom to accelerate the delivery of all cloud computing applications. With industry-leading cloud performance, power efficiency and scalability, Ampere processors are tailored for the growth of cloud and edge computing. Ampere cores are single threaded to provide predictable performance and workload isolation. They come with generous amounts of L1 and L2 cache, and System Level Cache to accelerate throughput and data-heavy workloads.

In order to facilitate faster evaluations Ampere engineers create reference platforms. These platforms are representative of production systems and used to validate both hardware and software.

Our current reference platform for Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max is Mt. Jade (PDF specs).

These platforms are entirely specified by Ampere and built to our specification by an ODM. Upon delivery of initial reference platforms, all hardware features of the platform are tested and validated. At the lowest level, we verify the boot-up process, test the BMC, and verify the embedded firmware.

We further verify that the entire system works as defined with the Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max, using an extensive barrage of hardware and software tests. Finally, we run system-level tests using a recent release of the Fedora Linux distribution (Fedora 36 as of Aug. 2022). Fedora typically contains the most recent Linux kernel and system libraries available, which makes it a great match for evaluating Linux-based operating systems on our platform.

In addition, we continually work with OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) on their platform designs in conjunction with ecosystem software partners to ensure that our platform offers the best possible experience to users.
Where to try and buy

We work with the open source software ecosystem to ensure rapid readiness and results for evaluations and deployments.

Our first concern is the firmware, the lowest level of hardware enablement. Ampere Computing contributes to the TianoCore/EDK2, LinuxBoot, OpenBMC, and OpenOCD projects for various aspects of firmware support for our reference platform.

Additionally, our engineers work with the Linux kernel, system libraries, and developer tooling communities to improve the end-to-end experience on AMpere Altra Family and AmpereOne Family hardware.

Key to our work with these open source communities is our Upstream First development approach. For example, we work with the Linux kernel community to support Ampere processor features directly in the latest Linux kernel. We regularly evaluate minimal functionality for a set of the most popular Linux distributions and run a set of functional tests for many common open-source projects.

Below you’ll find information describing how Ampere works with operating system vendors and Cloud Service Providers to allow developers and customers to run software with the confidence that their operating environment has been tested. Additionally, we will give an overview of the status of AArch64 support for the most popular Linux distributions for those considering those operating systems either for guest (VM or container runtime) environments, or for bare metal/host OS usage.

Most of Ampere’s work related to operating system validation is for host operating systems, running on bare metal. Once Ampere platform capabilities are made available to the operating system, the interfaces provided to guest workloads (either Virtual Machines, through a hypervisor, or container workloads, through operating system features) are independent of our underlying hardware and function the same on any ARM AArch64 servers. When we refer to operating system certifications and compatibility below, we are discussing host operating systems. We also provide a list of popular community-supported operating systems with links to the status of their AArch64 support which can be used for guest workloads.

Ampere collaborates with operating system vendors, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) customers to ensure the availability of the most popular software for our platforms. We work with Enterprise Linux vendors to ensure that their operating systems are certified on Ampere’s reference platform.

Certified Operating Systems

• Mt. Jade with Ampere Altra Max certified with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, 9
• Mt. Jade with Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max certified with Oracle Linux 8, 9
• Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max SoCs certified with Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04
• ADLink Ampere Developer Platform certified with Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04

All of Ampere’s CSP customers also offer support for a number of guest operating systems, running as virtual machines (VMs) or containers, with other popular operating systems available as “Community images”.

In addition to working directly with selected operating system vendors to certify the Mt. Jade reference platform as a bare metal platform, we regularly boot and evaluate a set of the most popular operating systems in our datacenters on bare metal over PXE. However, we expect our OEM and CSP partners to evaluate and certify the behavior of operating systems in their environment, as different customers can make different choices about hardware components in the platform.

For popular community-supported Linux distributions, we also collaborate to ensure the availability of hardware to those communities to enable them to build and test their operating systems on AArch64.