Quoting Andy Green <andy(a)warmcat.com>:
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.
> As far as actually moving forward...
>
> If it is possible to cross-compile RPMS, and get sane results, it
I think trying to make Fedora build cross is a whole other issue.
Building stuff cross is a trickier business than you might think.
Many packages with recent autotools can build cross OK, plus or
minus some magic needed to work with rpmbuild like that, but there
is no point doing all that work if there are fast ARM high-end
machines available that can build them native. Surely it's clear
that high end arm machines are clearly going to approach x86 kinds
of speed anyway in the next years reducing any pay back from the
effort of going cross.
I don't believe ARM is going to reach top end x86 speeds in the next
couple of years. I think MIPS64 has a better chance. I do believe it
can be a cost effective, energy efficient way to replace lower-end
systems like desktops and can get some traction in the data centers as
a replacement for low-end systems and caching type of servers.
I don't disagree with a split, but what concerns me is we don't have
enough resources to get F13-ARM out the door, much less two versions
of the distro. We don't have enough people nor the hardware to pull it
off.
If you can cross-compile, and knock out 50% of the bugs out in a
"pre-build" system before they hit the actual build system. It
increases the overall speed of development. I am fully aware it isn't
going to be simpler then using real hardware, but I was wondering if
it would be simpler then trying to get qemu-arm with virtio and the
plan9 layer working (i failed the first time).
Distributing a VM "image" with all the build tools set up and
everything configured is a lot simpler then setting up a full blown
dev environment.