arm support of workstation product

[Christian Schaller]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Josh Boyer" <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org>
> To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" <desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Friday, March 7, 2014 8:43:10 PM
> Subject: Re: arm support of workstation product
> 
> On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Dennis Gilmore <dennis at ausil.us> wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I noticed that in the hardware supported in the tech specs says 64 bit
> > only. I believe that in the f21 time frame we should be able to
> > integrate etnaviv [1][2] and be able to offer a viable arm based
> > option. note that arm ships in two formats, disk image that's ready to
> > run and install tree. there is no support to run anaconda and do a
> > liveinstall type install. For some possible systems putting the image
> > onto a sdcard and running will be fine. But for some others there may
> > be a desire to install onto a hard drive to use.
> >
> > I personally believe that it is a viable target.
> 
> I won't speak for the rest of the WG as a whole, but in the few
> conversations I've had with people ARM wasn't something most thought
> was a target for Workstation.  It might be feasible for interested
> people to produce Workstation ARM images, but I would be surprised if
> that were made a requirement at this point.
> 
> WG members, thoughts?
> 
I don't have an issue with ARM (or PPC) builds of the workstation, but
I don't think we should decide to make them officially supported platforms
before we feel very certain there is a viable community and ecosystem around
them to make the product workable medium to long term on those platforms. 
This means of cause the basic lithmus test of having the shell 'work' on a specific 
piece of hardware, but also there needs to be a viable roadmap for that hardware
going forward. I mean I don't want a situation where we declare ARM supported
because someone got a build working on a specific dev board, only to have the
manufacturer of that devboard switch GPU provider in the next iteration and leave
us without a working open driver.

Rob Clark is doing stellar work on Freedreno and the new Broadcom source code release
is good news in this regard, but I think I personally need to feel that a
officially supported ARM platform needs to be something we can believe will
continue to exist and not a one shot 'the stars aligned for us' situation.

There is also a question of what kind of hardware we want to support here, 
for instance if someone made ARM based laptops or desktops that seems like an
obvious target, but officially supporting something like the RasperryPi or PandaBoard
seems maybe something of an overkill. A homebrew devboard seems like it can be
'supported' well by just having an unofficial build for it.

As a sidenote writing portable code is important regardless of what platforms we have 
chosen to deem be 'supported' by the Workstation product. 

Christian