This week Amazon announced their new A1 arm64 EC2 Instances powered by their arm64 based Graviton Processors. With a minor delay, the shiny new Fedora 29 for aarch64 (arm64) is now available to run there too!

Details on getting running on AWS is in this good article on using AWS tools on Fedora article. In general, using Fedora on the AWS arm64 EC2 is the same as x86_64.

So while a new architecture on AWS is exciting, it’s at the same time old and boring. You’ll get the same versions of kernel, the same features like SELinux and the same versions of the toolchain stacks, like the latest gcc, golang, rust, and so on in Fedora 29 just like all other architectures. You’ll also get all the usual container tools like podman, buildah, skopeo and kubernetes, and orchestration tools like ansible. Basically, if you’re using Fedora on AWS you can use it in the same way on arm64.

Getting started

The initial launch of A1 aarch64 instances are available in the following four regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). Direct links to launch the Fedora aarch64 AMIs directly are available here on the Fedora Cloud site.

Getting help

The Fedora support for aarch64 is robust. It’s been widely used and tested across a number of platforms. Of course, new users and new use cases will pick up issues that we’ve yet to encounter. So what is the best way to get help? If you have a crash in a particular application, report it in the usual way through RH Bugzilla. Set that bug to block the ARMTracker tracker alias to help identify Arm issues.

For assistance with Arm specific queries and issues the Fedora Arm mailing list. There is also the #fedora-arm IRC channel on Freenode.

Known issues

There is one known issue. The instance takes a while to get started — up to 5 minutes. This is due to entropy, and is a general problem in virtual environments, across all architectures. We’re working to speed this up and it should be fixed soon. Once things are up and running, though, everything works as expected.

Upcoming features

There will be Fedora 29 Atomic host coming in the next Two Week Atomic release. We unfortunately missed their release this time by a small window. It’ll be available in about two weeks with their next release, and will appear on the site once released. We can’t let you have all the fun at once. 😉