Fedora ARM QA testing

[Peter Robinson]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-03-24 at 13:00 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>> On 03/23/2012 09:36 PM, Paul Whalen wrote:
>> > A ticket was previously opened up to address the issue of incorporating ARM into the existing QA tests (http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-qa/ticket/277), and begin the discussion of what work is still needed. I would like to revisit this on the mailing list, to see what steps need to be addressed by the ARM team for a smooth migration to be possible.
>>
>> Yeah well the content and the discussion in that ticket does not make
>> much sense to me.
>>
>> Incorporating arm or any other cpu for that matter in our process should
>> not be a problem.
>>
>> If it is, then it is something that we need to fix since our process
>> should work regardless of the cpu in question.
>> ( we dont care if it's primary or secondary either  )
>>
>> The problem you are faced with is basically this reporters that own,can
>> afford to buy or otherwise have access to hardware with arm cpu.
>> ( same thing applies to sparc,ppc etc ) since our test coverage entirely
>> depends upon that.
>>
>> If there is any arm specific testing ( which I highly doubt since we
>> dont have any i386 or x86_64 bit once ) that we need to perform we would
>> just work those out with you guys and document them.
>
> The big difference is that ARM doesn't currently use, or plan to use,
> anaconda for deployment. They work by building images specific to
> particular target devices, which you just dump onto the device and then
> boot.

That's not entirely true, in the short term we likely won't use
anaconda, in the medium to long term we plan to use anacona
exclusively, whether that be on the server style hardware using
traditional install methods (gui, text or kickstart) or to build the
images in similar ways to how we currently use it to build LiveCDs or
amazon images. Having spoken with the Anaconda guys in Milan and
Blacksburg they have some even more interesting ideas that I could
have imagined but they're all RFE stages at the moment. In the more
distant future (A15 and arm64) alot of non embedded ARM platforms will
even use uEFI..... whether that's a good thing or not I'll leave up to
the reader to decide :)

Peter