Support for RHEL 9 ARM guests

[tempest-t]

It would be great to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.x ARM (RHEL 9 ARM Beta) guests

"The 64-bit ARM architecture has a 4 KB page size in RHEL 9

Red Hat has selected a 4 KB page size of physical memory for the 64-bit ARM architecture in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. This size pairs well with the workloads and memory amounts present on the majority of ARM-based systems. To employ large page sizes efficiently, use the huge pages option to address a greater amount of memory or workloads with large data sets."

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9-beta/html/9.0_release_notes...

Apple M1
getconf PAGESIZE
16384

[Technogeezer]

Have you tried running the RHEL 9 beta on the Fusion Tech Preview? I'm running both CentOS 9 Stream and Fedora 35 which when executing

getconf PAGESIZE

reports 4096 (4K)..

[tempest-t]

getconf PAGESIZE

16384 reported by MacBook Pro, RHEL 9 with 4 KB page size should run, but the installation of RHEL 9 beta 1 will not start because system boot hangs after the two Tux

[Technogeezer]

What option did you choose to boot the beta installer?

I'm wondering if the installer is booting into a graphical environment with Wayland running on a 5.14 or later Linux kernel.

[Technogeezer]

In case what I asked about is the case, I just created an idea to support Wayland with the VMware-provided Linux virtual graphics adapter. Having to manually work around that kernel-based adapter's lack of Wayland support is becoming annoying.

[tempest-t]

Same issue when I boot the system in text mode.

linux /images/pxeboot/vmlinuz inst.stage2=hd:LABEL=RHEL-9-0-0-BaseOS-aarch64 inst.text

[Technogeezer]

This looks like something I've seen with Ubuntu 5.15 kernels not booting. (not that it's the exact same cause). Something that works with other distros doesn't work here.

It appears that there's something that the RHEL 9 ARM kernel doesn't like about the virtual machine hardware/environment that Fusion is providing.

The situation is strange since other Red Hat arm64 architecture derivatives such as Fedora and CentOS Stream work just fine.

[tempest-t]

RHEL 9 beta should basically work fine too

See 3 November 2021 11:01 AM and 31 December 2021 2:07 PM entries for Parallels 17.1 and UTM on this page

https://access.redhat.com/discussions/5966451

[Technogeezer]

I finally got access to the beta and am seeing the same things as you. Very strange indeed.

[tempest-t]

Issue

The system does not boot in graphics mode because the vmwgfx video driver kernel module is not present in the current version - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 Beta Update 1 Binary DVD (File: rhel-baseos-9.0-beta-1-aarch64-dvd.iso / SHA-256 Checksum: f569369e5219cc8108a2962b06060d3ddb58f1e86cdf52f538a2173404b7e073)

Workaround

1. Boot from rhel-baseos-9.0-beta-1-aarch64-dvd.iso

2. Select Troubleshooting --> Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 in text mode

3. Wait ca 20 seconds

4. Switch to virtual console 2 with fn + command + F2

5. Stop the installer with systemctl stop anaconda

6. Start the installer in text mode manually with anaconda -T

7. Select option 2) Use text mode

8. Install RHEL 9 Beta 1

[tempest-t]

 Closed

added 2022-01-12

The new version now works right out of the box without any adjustments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 Beta Update 2 Binary DVD
Last modified: 2022-01-11
File: rhel-baseos-9.0-beta-1-aarch64-dvd.iso
SHA-256: 25de27b1e7b45e5629e80dc5ac9409ccc2c036b5f6cb5d3f4d205c8bf875142e