Identify alternative hardware to Xilinx ZCU102

[pahmann]

The XIlinx ZCU102 board has a good support for Xen and works well with Zephyr and Linux.
The main two drawbacks are the price and the missing virtualization support for the GPU.

The idea is to find an alternative either from Xilinx or another manufacturer.
The current observation is that a community hardware can be the Kria260 boards, which also have good support from Linaro.
However, the boards still do not have rich GPU virtualization support. Depending on the use case this may have lower impact.

Other candidates identified so far may be boards from ST or NXP, but selection is open to a good propoasal, where we can have Zephyr, Linux and an OSS hypervisor (preferable Xen) which can be brought into a CI system with using plainly open source tools.

[pahmann]

We should consider x86 maybe?!

• Discuss about x86 hardware
  • x86 are known to be more expensive and has higher power consumption in the past, but this may not be applicable to any use case.
  • Concept of ARM and x86 system architecture is different. Many things are database driven like with PCIe, USB and less hardware drivers.
  • This is nice compared to device trees as there is a standard.
  • The x86 processors are strong for computation, but you miss additional co-processors.

[pahmann]

The CEO of OpenHW Group approached ELISA after the FOSDEM presentation to discuss about hardware options. It may include RISC-V.
Need to schedule a follow-up with them.