I've been running Fedora ARM for a short while, and am really impressed by the work that's been done. It seems that this will become even more important as new ARM-based devices -- tablets, home automation, netbooks, XO 1.75 -- hit the market.
I'd like to help with this initiative. I'm at Seneca College, and we're willing to host ARM builders and a Koji instance, with a goal of tracking kernels, packages, and updates as close to the primary archs as possible. I've got a small group working on this infrastructure, and we should have it fully up and running in March (next week is our study break).
I have a couple of questions:
(1) What's a good representative sample of systems to test on, in addition to a SheevaPlug, OpenRD, BeagleBoard, and HawkBoard?
(2) Since most ARM systems are initially booted with a prebuilt rootFS, Anaconda has little value. However, it seems that building the rootFS for ARM is not really any different from building a Live CD for i386/x86_64 except for the final output format (obviously, this would have to be done on an ARM system or in emulation so package scriptlets could run). I'm wondering if we can adapt the livecdcreator to have selectable output for various ARM devices, building images for SD cards (and so forth, as appropriate to each target device) that have the root FS plus the kernel with the right naming/file sequencing in the image. This would make it easier to build a rootFS with a particular package set. Any feedback on this idea?
-Chris (ctyler on freenode)
On Sat, 2010-02-27 at 08:37 -0800, Chris Tyler wrote:
I've been running Fedora ARM for a short while, and am really impressed by the work that's been done. It seems that this will become even more important as new ARM-based devices -- tablets, home automation, netbooks, XO 1.75 -- hit the market.
I'd like to help with this initiative. I'm at Seneca College, and we're willing to host ARM builders and a Koji instance, with a goal of tracking kernels, packages, and updates as close to the primary archs as possible. I've got a small group working on this infrastructure, and we should have it fully up and running in March (next week is our study break).
This is great! What kind of ARM boards do you have? Let us catch up on irc and discuss further.
I have a couple of questions:
(1) What's a good representative sample of systems to test on, in addition to a SheevaPlug, OpenRD, BeagleBoard, and HawkBoard?
(2) Since most ARM systems are initially booted with a prebuilt rootFS, Anaconda has little value. However, it seems that building the rootFS for ARM is not really any different from building a Live CD for i386/x86_64 except for the final output format (obviously, this would have to be done on an ARM system or in emulation so package scriptlets could run). I'm wondering if we can adapt the livecdcreator to have selectable output for various ARM devices, building images for SD cards (and so forth, as appropriate to each target device) that have the root FS plus the kernel with the right naming/file sequencing in the image. This would make it easier to build a rootFS with a particular package set. Any feedback on this idea?
Yeah this makes sense, and as you mention above, this will be great once we have more end-user(ish?) ARM devices available.
-Chris (ctyler on freenode)
Kedar.
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Chris Tyler -
Kedar Sovani