feat(oran_fhlib_5g): O-RAN 7.2 FrontHaul Interface on Arm
This MR is enabling the 7.2 FHI on Arm systems.
Even though the performance are yet very bad (UE connection is very difficult, 100Mbps DL, almost no UL),
still I would like to merge this now since the matter of making the FHI work is rather orthogonal to the performance issues.
So merging this feature would provide a reliable settlement on top of which we could then progressively enhance the porting of OAI to Arm.
Especially that would make our work easier by having less features to rebase regularly on develop.
The main features this MR is made of are:
Make the xran patches dual
We provide patches for both E and F releases of xran that handles x86 targets as well as Arm targets.
Both patches have been tested on both types of machines (armix, broadbill).
Thanks to @brobert and @changy for their work on xran.
Perform 9-bits BFP compression with ArmRAL
Since the BFP compression implementation provided with xran does rely heavily on AVX512,
we provide an alternative implementation that is relying on Arm's RAN Acceleration Library (ArmRAL).
As of writing this commit description, only 9-bits compression is supported. Other IQ width will be added.
This upcoming change does not prevent review to be performed since the BFP compression functions of ArmRAL are identical except for the IQ width.
Adding further IQ width is therefore very straightforward.
Fixes in oran_fhlib_5g to support Arm
The library oran_fhlib_5g needed few changes to successfully compile and run on Arm systems.
Thanks to @brobert for his work on oran_fhlib_5g.