OpenStack community released ‘queens’ version this week. IMHO it is quite important moment for AArch64 community as well because it works out of the box for us.
Gone are things like setting hw_firmware_type=uefi for each image you upload to Glance — Nova assumes UEFI to be the default firmware on AArch64 (unless you set the variable to different value for some reason). This simplifies things as users does not have to worry about and we should have less support questions on new setups of Linaro Developer Cloud (which will be based on ‘Queens’ instead of ‘Newton’).
There is a working graphical console if your guest image uses properly configured kernel (4.14 from Debian/stretch-backports works fine, 4.4 from Ubuntu/xenial (used by CirrOS) does not have graphics enabled). Handy feature which we were asked already by some users.
Sad thing is state of live migration on AArch64. It simply does not work through the whole stack (Nova, libvirt, QEMU) because we have no idea what exactly cpu we are running on and how it is compatible with other cpu cores. In theory live migration between same type of processors (like XGene1 -> XGene1) should be possible but we do not have even that level of information available. More information can be found in bug 1430987 reported against libvirt.
Less sad part? We set cpu_model to ‘host-passthrough’ by default now (in Nova) so nevermind which deployment method is used it should work out of the box.
When it comes to building (Kolla) and deploying (Kolla Ansible) most of the changes were done during Pike cycle. During Queens’ one most of the changes were small tweaks here and there. I think that our biggest change was convincing everyone in Kolla(-ansible) to migrate from MariaDB 10.0.x (usually from external repositories) to 10.1.x taken from distribution (Debian) or from RDO.
What will Rocky bring? Better hotplug for PCI Express machines (AArch64/virt, x86/q35 models) is one thing. I hope that live migration stuff situation will improve as well.