Inquiry Regarding Future ARM Architecture Support

[ykt-hiroki]

Hello OPEA community,

I am writing to inquire about future plans for ARM architecture support in OPEA. I understand that ARM architecture is not currently supported. I am interested in using OPEA on an ARM-based system and would appreciate any information regarding future plans for ARM support.

Is ARM support included in the roadmap, or is it something being considered for the future? Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

[xiguiw]

@ykt-hiroki
ARM support is not in the roadmap now. We have no resources and platform now.

We welcome you contribute to support it.

[ykt-hiroki]

@xiguiw
Thank you for your response. I'm interested in contributing to the development of ARM support. Currently, I'm considering starting ARM support from the GenAI Examples' ChatQnA, because AMD began their GPU support from there.
I've checked the contribution guidelines (https://opea-project.github.io/latest/community/CONTRIBUTING.html), but I'm still unclear on the procedure. Specifically, I'm wondering if an RFC is required for ARM support. Could you please advise?

[eero-t]

I'm not developer in these projects (just another contributor), but here's my take on RFC need...

By "ARM support" I assume you to mean Dockerfiles for generating binary images that are based on ARM variants of PyTorch etc, and and Docker compose files that deploy those + already(?) existing ARM images of Redis, vLLM etc.

Those are rather useless without CI checking them, and providing corresponding images. This means that some party needs to sponsor ARM based CI workers, there needs to be CI modifications to use those to build ARM image variants, and produce resulting images to DockerHub. And somebody commited to debugging issues specific those ARM images. Which to me sounds like a workflow change, i.e. needing RFC.