FreeBSD on AMD's arm64 chips?

[jackp]

Is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to acquire one of the newly-available dev kits for AMD's arm64 (armv8) chips (codenamed "Seattle")? They're a bit pricier ($3000) than I thought they'd be, but there's a lot of interest in these machines (e.g., for web servers) so it'd be nice to have FreeBSD support ready for when the production machines become available.

http://www.amd.com/en-us/who-we-are/cor ... events/arm

If the Foundation buys one, then once FreeBSD is running on it, the kit could then be used as a Jenkins CI build machine for arm64, which would help get ports up to speed too. At the moment, FreeBSD/arm64 development requires an emulator running on Linux: https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64

 

[kpa]

I doubt that the Foundation itself is going to do any such investments. This is a clear case for an interested third party to chip in with their money and fund the development project.

 

[wblock@]

The Foundation might fund a project if someone formally proposed it. The first step would be finding someone to do the work.