Intro

Lustre development on ARM machines is possible but requires some more care on an Apple Silicon Mac due to some kernel restrictions. Most out of the box EL8 aarch64 versions assume a 64K page size which is not supported on Apple Silicon. 4k and 16k are supported. As result a install ISO file loops in Grub since the kernel cannot boot. This is fixed for EL9+ aarch64 versions and do not require this process.

This document walks through the steps required to run EL8 virtualized on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Process

Virtualization is not possible. Therefore, we must emulate a VM to build a kernel with a compatible page size. Due to emulation, this is very slow. Here, we use UTM with QEMU. This walk-through uses Rocky 8.7 aarch64 as an example. 

Setup

1. Install UTM and create a new VM with the Rocky iso. This loops in Grub due to the above restriction.
2. Stop the VM. Right-click on VM `Edit->QEMU` and untick `Use Hypervisor` to enable emulation. In the same settings window, change `Display->Emulated Display Card` from `virtio-gpu-pci` to `virtio-ramfb` otherwise there is not display output.
3. Boot and install OS as usual.

New kernel

1. First install some build dependencies as root: