aarch64 support needed

[xoffey]

My company, Neocortix, operates a fleet of thousands of powerful 64-bit Arm compute nodes. We are one of the biggest contributors to the rosetta@home and LHC@home projects, and a few others.

I don't know if this is the best way to ask this question, but I would like some help on building the BRP app for Debian on aarch64. I know that Christian has been able to do it, but I have had some trouble getting the already-built version to work on our platform, so it would be great if you could provide a makefile, or any relevant advice.

Also, it it's not too off-topic, I could use a pointer to where to find an aarch64-compatible version of the FGRP app for einstein.

Thank you for your efforts!

[smoe]

Hello, great that you found us.

Technically, the package should just build. I mean - the autobuilders of Debian have managed, also for aarch64. You just have those nasty ~15-25% jobs that are not confirmed by the upstream reference build because of an incompatibility of BRP with a modern glibc. How far did you get?

FGRP for aarch64 - this is Christian's expertise that to the best of my knowledge was forwarded to upstream and I understood this is just prioritized down over all the science that needs to be done and a day only having 24 hours. Have you considered looking into TN-GRID? They are supporting aarch64 and are doing something good also for understanding Covid-19. And they have very moderate (<70MB) RAM requirement, an initial 500MB download, though.

I am confident that E@H will follow suite as soon as other projects have some higher percentage of ARM-based contributions. For me the BRP package with that divergence over the glibc version has only an educational value.

I saw https://www.neocortix.com/coronavirus and like it. Many thanks for doing this!
You may have seen our porting of BOINC to OpenWrt - would that contribute to your cause?

[xoffey]

At first, I was stuck because I had no instructions and was trying by just running make, with no arguments, in the cloned repo.

Then I found Christian had some instructions on page 88 of a forum thread at einstein. Using those instructions, that use git-buildpackage, I eventually built an executable that works in Debian stretch on an Amazon EC2 a1.xlarge instance, which is aarch64.

However, this build does not work on our platform, because we do not yet support shmget. It is the same problem we have with Christian's binary. Do you happen to know a way to avoid the need for shmget, by any chance?

PS: we are big on TN-Grid and are currently ranked #19 in the world (user "neocortix_0") based on 35 of our nodes working on that project.