[fedora-arm] Fedora ARM on OLPC

[Chris Tyler]

On Mon, 2010-06-07 at 19:15 -0400, Chris Ball wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Recently OLPC announced that we're working on two new ARM devices --
> a laptop (XO-1.75) and tablet (XO-3), both running on Marvell's Armada
> 610 (MMP2) SoC:
> 
> http://blog.laptop.org/2010/05/27/xo3-marvell-and-olpc/
> 
> We're interested in shipping Fedora ARM on both devices, since we've
> been using Fedora on our x86 laptops all along.

Obviously, OLPC is a major target for the Fedora ARM effort :-)

> I've got the Fedora 12 rootfs running on an MMP2 board already, but
> we've got a few questions about how shipping Fedora ARM in a product
> would work:
> 
> * Since Fedora ARM isn't an official release or secondary architecture
>   yet, is it possible to ship a legal Fedora remix using its packages?

As I understand it, ARM is a recognized SA, so it should be fine to ship
a remix based on it.


Here's the status of the Fedora ARM effort:

The previous ARM build farm was decommissioned, and a new one is being
built, with some corresponding team changes. The status right now is
that the shipment of new build hardware (a farm of GuruPlugs) was
delayed due to a design defect; a revised version of hardware is
supposed to be shipped next week. In the interim, there are two builders
available.

dgilmore and PaulW are (as I understand it) bootstrapping the repos to
prepare for using koji-shadow. (I'm away right now (teaching POSSE etc)
but will rejoin the effort in early July).

> * Which release would it make most sense for us to use?  I know that
>   F13 isn't available yet, although I see that dgilmore's started some
>   F13 package builds in koji.

Only the previous F12 binary packages are available now. However, I
don't think it will be too long before we start pumping out F13
packages. The challenge is that the ARM patches for F12 didn't get
committed upstream, so there's a backlog of package maintenance that
needs attention.

> * Do you think there's much of a chance that F14 could have ARM as
>   an official secondary architecture?

The intention is to shadow the primary arch builds using Dennis'
koji-shadow system, so eventually we'll have rawhide and releases fairly
closely following the primary archs.

So yes, F14 ARM will be there -- the question (and we'll understand the
answer to this better over the next few months) is how much lag there
will be between the primary and ARM secondary arch releases, and how
complete the package set will be relative to the primary archs (for
example, right now Mono doesn't appear to build on ARM, which knocks out
the other packages that depend on Mono).

> * Relatedly, what could we do to help that happen, and to help with
>   the port in general?

Two things would be really helpful:

- Point us to a list of packages you are using in your Remix, so we can
put priority on those as we triage build failures.

- When the time comes (soon!), help get the ARM patches upstream. This
includes both packaging patches and source patches.

--
Chris