[fedora-arm] Support for ARMv7, hardware math

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 8:52 PM, Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
> On 11/30/10 19:49, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
>
> Hi -
>
>> I understand we probably will have logistic issues releasing v7 arch
>> for F14 since it has already been released (for x86), I assume it
>> isn't trivial to add compiler flags for the 13k packages in both F14
>> and rawhide(F15. That sounds like a lot work. It is easier to put them
>> directly into rawhide rather then in both places so they are there
>> moving forward (still a lot of work but it only needs to be done once
>> and you probably can easily script it.)
>
> Compiler flags and so on are mainly handled by rpmbuild based on the
> macros for the architecture it's building on.  So it's not like patching
> thousands of packages.
>
>> We could branch out a cortex or a v7 release, but that is more
>> logistic issues, and honestly by dropping arm5tel support. I dont
>> think we are dropping much hardware that people are actually
>> interested in running Fedora on and especially by the F15 release.
>
> I am very interested in running Fedora on armv5tel as we can today.
>
>> Tablets, laptops, embedded servers would be more realistic, and
>
> There is a quite wide spread of arm hardware about, it is not going to
> be the case that suddenly everything is Cortex.  For example these last
> days I have been using Arm Fedora on NXP LPC3250 which is a new, cheap
> chip based on the ARM926EJ core which is armv5; Fedora is working great
> on SD Card.  The last thing I worked on uses Fedora on an iMX31 CPU
> which is ARM1136 / armv6.
>
> If it makes a big difference to build for high end cortex specifically,
> then I hope we're able to keep armv5 while the chips are still current
> and being designed into things along the lines of i386 / x86_64.

I think that is most definitely the plan and I believe the best way to
go. The perf improvements that hw FP and NEON (equiv of SSE on intel)
is great and it something worth optimising for and the way distros are
tending to go but there are 1000s of ARM v5 devices out there as well
and I don't think the chipset is going anywhere soon.

Peter