Non-SoC target for ARM64

[Philip Prindeville]

Hi,

I'm thinking about the utility of being able to build a generalized ARM64 image (not "armvirt") for bring up on new platforms for testing.

There are a lot of generalized computing platforms like the Ampere Altra servers that you might want to use as in inbound Apache proxy server, a load balancer, a traffic shaper, etc.

Can we add a generic target for ARM64 just as x86_64 (or x86/64) is the generic AMD64 target?

I'd like something that I could easily run on a Graviton2 or Altra or Ten64, etc.

Also not clear to me why the various ARM targets like "layerscape", "imx", "octeontx", etc. don't live under a common directory.

Yes, ARM is more optimized for SoCs that have I/O on-chip and hence there's less mix-n-match compared to x86, but it's not completely unheard of either.

What do you all think of adding a generic target for aarch64?

And how awful would refactoring arm and aarch64 be?

Thanks,

-Philip