[fedora-arm] Fedora 20 for Raspberry Pi????

[Steve Underwood]

On 12/27/2013 03:49 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On 12/26/2013 02:20 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> writes:
>>
>>> (e.g. (but not limited to) a large number of packages make little or
>>> no effort to ensure memory accesses are aligned - including the likes
>>> of e2fsprogs, and transparent alignment fixup in hardware is only
>>> available on armv7 and later).
>>
>> I'm surprised that Ted isn't willing to fix issues in e2fsprogs.
>>
>> If you can point me to the upstream bug reports I can ping him to see
>> what's up?
>
> Take a look here:
> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.ext4/33324
>
> As has been mentioned before, there is a whole shedload of packages 
> that have similar issues - I have seen literally thousands of 
> alignment faults get reported (I have the alignment set to fix+warn on 
> my armv5tel builders) in various packages during build and test 
> stages. Once upon a time I planned to collate the data and get the 
> issue reported to all upstream maintainers, but that is a mammoth task 
> just to report, let alone fix, and I have very little faith there is 
> enough will among the developers to fix all the affected packages and 
> ensure they write code that isn't affected by this problem going forward.
This is hardly surprising, as you can't really fix what you can't test.

15 years ago my Linux/Unix code was always clear of alignment issues, as 
I developed on a mix of Alpha and x86 machines, and the Alphas didn't 
like misalignment. I think enough people developed on a mixture of 
machines to flush out most of the alignment issues back then.

We entered a period of such x86 dominance that few people saw alignment 
issues any more, and I suspect the number of issues grew rapidly. Now, 
non-x86 work is growing again, but its mostly on ARMv7 devices, so I 
think its unlikely the frequency of alignment issues will ever go down 
again.

Regards,
Steve