Manish
Votes: 0Posted On: Oct 10, 2018 04:41:29
The Advanced RISC Machine, widely known as ARM is a type of architecture for computer processors that is built on the Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC).
ARM holdings are responsible for designing and developing the architecture of the cores that implement this instruction set and licenses these designs to a number of companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products.
What makes these ARM-based processors highly desirables?
These processors are desirable for light, portable, battery-powered devices—including smartphones, laptops and tablet computers, and other embedded systems. For supercomputers, which consume large amounts of electricity, ARM could also be a power-efficient solution.
Processors that have a RISC architecture typically require fewer transistors than those with a complex instruction set computing (CISC) architecture (such as the x86 processors found in most personal computers). This improves cost, power consumption, and heat dissipation.
Does CentOS have a version for ARM-based processors?
CentOS has been largely focused on x86 systems, but that has been changing over the last few years. The initial work on CentOS for ARM started back in the CentOS 6 days targeting 32-bit ARMv6 and ARMv7 CPUs.
With the growing list of easily accessible ARM hardware like the RaspBerry Pi 2 and the ODROID-C1, several community efforts have sprouted, working out the details for getting CentOS-7 built and available for the new boards.
In January 2015, which was after CentOS 7 was released, the project restarted using that base but targeting aarch64 with a lot more support for ARM.
As of May 10, 2018, CentOS Linux 7.5 (version 1804) is generally available for AArch64/arm64 machines.
CentOS 7 for aarch64 is an “AltArch” release, managed by the Alternative Architecture Special Interest Group (AltArch SIG) to support architectures that are not supported by the base releases. Supported hardware includes the AMD Mustang, AMD Seattle, Cavium ThunderX, and HiSilicon D05 (Hi1616) systems, with developmental support for Qualcomm and Marvell Armada based hardware.