[fedora-arm] Cheap ARM devices

[Andy Green]

On 03/04/10 19:04, Somebody in the thread at some point said:

>> I think the floodgates are about to open on many categories of ARM
>> devices. I wonder if this thing has the RAM to run Fedora well, though?
>
> RAM is a really good point, I think it will be in the ballpark of 256

It depends what you're trying to do, but if you just want a normal 
"runlevel 3" rootfs and run some nongraphical apps on top, 32MBytes is 
fine and leaves more than half of that for the apps after the usual 
daemons are up.

> (plus or minus a bit). Also, I'd like to open up the conversation
> about version of ARM we as a SIG want to support as the efforts start
> to ramp up while targeting popular devices. I think ARMv9 might be a
> little too aggressive but are there any devices that are still
> prominent that are ARMv5? Would it be possible (or even feasible) to
> maintain ARMv5, ARMv7, and ARMv9 in parallel and treat them as
> separate architectures?

I think there is value in ARMv4 / ARM9 build, but it starts to get a bit 
more dependent on the CPU and the task.  For example I designed devices 
before with AT91RM9200 which was 180MHz ARM9, it could certainly run 
this OK but you might start to notice that you are running full bash for 
example and not busybox.

Fedora really shines if the hardware is just enough that you can't tell 
or care that you are running full versions of everything, working on 
these devices becomes pretty much the same as working on any Fedora box. 
  But now Atmel are doing a similar chip at 400MHz with faster SDRAM, it 
seems you can find ARMv4 devices which will get the full benefit of 
normal Fedora.  It's just going to be quite a little investment to 
recook everything and it's understandable if people motivated for 
generously working on v5 solution aren't motivated for v4.

-Andy