I will say I am
an aarch64/arm developer & hacker. I regularly play any Android game you can think of from the Google Play store on my x86_64 modern hardware. I stand out on like a signal flare in Steam benchmarks, because I'm playing with a core i7 on games meant for a 5v-2w aarch64 cpu. So I'm just saying I know how to crosscompile.
lets talk about barriers to entry:
an Apple m1 loaded with 24GB of RAM will run you $1,599
and the newer m2 also with 24GB of RAM will run you $1,899
according to the list prices on Apple.com.
I'm not particularly a fan of Apple products; both for their price points and their political/religious philosophy. They make really polished, closed-source Unfree Products. Count me as a MAC hater. Yay GNU. Boo Apple.
My point is, there are significant barriers to entry, you will never see alot of development or support in this space. A vendor must GIVE AWAY FOR FREE or a trivial license fee, if you actually want people to make stuff + make stuff work.
A more realistic aarch64/arm8v development platform that could in theory run the ONTAP simulator, would be a Radxa Rock 5 Model B. You can get those with 16GB of RAM on a rk3588 cpu (NOT rk3588S, thats the cut-down version of the cpu, like the iPhone SE),
and you can get that arm board for more abouts $300 US, when they actually start shipping (pre-orders now). You have to acknowledge the 'culture' of arm developers, I am on other forums where people argue the pros and cons of $49 devices versus $29 devices, but for sure nobody is talking about $1899 Apple devices.
Last time I was here it was get the ONTAP simulator, I made it work in Virtualbox (because I hate VMWare as much as I hate Apple). I'm sure it would be a rocky road but one entirely doable to make it work on KVM in rhel/fedora. vmdk to qkow2 conversation is old hat for those of us who swing back and forth between QEMU and Virtualbox. I dont know netapp.com's reasons to favor VMWare so publically, any system administrator worth his salt could support it in multiple formats.
Give me free Rock 5 Model B and a couple pizzas, I could make it work. But I'm telling you (and most these threads on the ONTAP simulator), it works just fine in Virtualbox if you want the easy way out.
