ARM/x86 mixed architecture

It is possible to configure CHI-in-a-Box to support bare metal provisioning on both x86- and ARM-based bare metal hardware. There are a few steps, namely configuring support for iPXE, which when combined with UEFI boot can provide different EFI images to the pre-boot environment depending on the target host architecture.

The following assumes your Site Configuration is stored at $site_config.

Configuration changes

$site_config/defaults.yml:

# When set to 'yes', a new ipxe server container is deployed on the 
# Ironic conductor node(s).
enable_ironic_ipxe: yes

You must additionally provide a custom ironic.conf file that enables the iPXE plugin:

# Copy ironic config to avoid overwriting
cp path/to/chi-in-a-box/kolla/node_custom_config/ironic.conf \
    $CC_ANSIBLE_SITE/node_custom_config/ironic.conf

Then, make sure the file contains the following lines

[DEFAULT]
enabled_boot_interfaces = ipxe,pxe

[pxe]
ipxe_bootfile_name_by_arch = aarch64:aarch64/snponly.efi

Apply changes

./cc-ansible --site $CC_ANSIBLE_SITE upgrade --tags ironic

Post-config

1. Copy the iPXE binary from the v2021-11.01 CHI-in-a-Box release. You must deploy the EFI images to all Ironic conductor nodes (usually there is only one.) The Ironic conductor must already be running for this to succeed because it uses a docker cp.

tar xf $ipxe_tarball aarch64/snponly.efi
docker exec -it ironic_conductor mkdir -p /tftpboot/aarch64/
docker cp aarch64/snponly.efi ironic_conductor:/tftpboot/aarch64/

1. Upload the IPA kernel and ramdisk images from the v2021-11.01 CHI-in-a-Box release to your site:

openstack image create --file ironic-python-agent-aarch64.initramfs ironic-python-agent-aarch64.initramfs
# Note the UUID of the image, it is used as $ramdisk_uuid later

openstack image create --file ironic-python-agent-aarch64.kernel ironic-python-agent-aarch64.kernel
# Note the UUID of the image, it is used as $kernel_uuid later

1. Configure your ARM nodes to deploy with the ARM64-compiled IPA image, and also set the architecture on the node, which will help iPXE understand it is an ARM node at boot time.

⚠️ Requires python-doniclient>=0.4.0

openstack hardware set --architecture aarch64 --deploy_kernel $kernel_uuid --deploy_ramdisk $ramdisk_uuid $node

Verification

You should now be able to reserve and provision an ARM node in your environment in addition to any existing x86 nodes, which should remain operational.