Possible to compile a image for the ARM64 architecture (e.g., vs-arm64.bin) or a SONiC image that can be directly booted via GRUB on an AArch64 system?

[Zeta Zig]

I am currently working on porting SONiC to an ARM64 device. Since the hardware is still in development, the environment is more like a SoC board with few PCIe lanes. I have tried compiling a bootable image like vs-arm64.bin to set up a general ARM PC environment for continued development.

Is there a method to run SONiC without flashing it to the device's flash memory, and instead boot it directly via GRUB?

Additional Info: My ASICs are in the form of PCIe cards plugged into the motherboard.

So far, I have attempted the following:

1. Compiling the individual SONiC Docker components on the ARM64 device – [Success].
2. Installing the generated .deb packages onto a clean ARM64 Debian system – [Failure].
3. Building an ARM64 binary to be loaded and booted with GRUB – [Failure].

Would appreciate any advice or suggestions. Thank you.

[林小浩]

As someone who has successfully ported ARM to two platforms, I would like to say that it is feasible to use grub, but I still recommend using uboot, because the official support for ARM is more in uboot, and you don't need to worry too much about grub. What you should consider is how to get onie running on the machine.