Fedora 8/ARM available

[Lennert Buytenhek]

Hi all,

We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.

The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
Fedora packages have been built for ARM.

The Fedora/ARM architecture wiki page has more info:
	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM

The easiest way to start using Fedora 8/ARM is to download the
prebuilt root filesystem, which can be booted in QEMU, or chroot'ed
into or booted from on any ARMv5 or later processor running in little
endian mode.  Additional packages can be installed by using yum,
which is provided in the filesystem.

A HOWTO which describes getting Fedora/ARM running in QEMU is here:
	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu

There currently are a handful of known issues, which are described at:
	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO

Please help us by using the Fedora/ARM port and reporting any issues
you run into so that we can fix them.


thanks,
Lennert

[Caolán McNamara]

On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 00:33 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
>  Hi all,
>  
>  We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  
>  The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  Fedora packages have been built for ARM. 
FWIW, I ported OOo to arm-eabi last year, the "vanilla" rpms of the time
are at...
http://ooo.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/cws/upload/armeabip...
and that work is now integrated into 2.4.0 as in rawhide so in theory
for F9 it should build out of the box.

At the time there was no ecj/libgcj port to arm-eabi so the extra flag
to OOo's configure required to workaround that was --without-java, I
see java-1.5.0-gcj-devel in the repo now so that's presumably
unnecessary now.

C.

[Oliver Falk]

Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
>  Hi all,
>  
>  We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  
>  The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  Fedora packages have been built for ARM.
>  
>  The Fedora/ARM architecture wiki page has more info:
>  	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM
>  
>  The easiest way to start using Fedora 8/ARM is to download the
>  prebuilt root filesystem, which can be booted in QEMU, or chroot'ed
>  into or booted from on any ARMv5 or later processor running in little
>  endian mode.  Additional packages can be installed by using yum,
>  which is provided in the filesystem.
>  
>  A HOWTO which describes getting Fedora/ARM running in QEMU is here:
>  	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu
>  
>  There currently are a handful of known issues, which are described at:
>  	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO
>  
>  Please help us by using the Fedora/ARM port and reporting any issues
>  you run into so that we can fix them. 
I should have bought something else/bigger than my WRT54, I guess :-)

-of

[Andrew Haley]

Caolan McNamara writes:
>  
>  On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 00:33 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
>  > Hi all,
>  > 
>  > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  > 
>  > The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  > little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  > Fedora packages have been built for ARM.
>  
>  FWIW, I ported OOo to arm-eabi last year, the "vanilla" rpms of the time
>  are at...
>  http://ooo.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/cws/upload/armeabip...
>  and that work is now integrated into 2.4.0 as in rawhide so in theory
>  for F9 it should build out of the box.
>  
>  At the time there was no ecj/libgcj port to arm-eabi so the extra flag
>  to OOo's configure required to workaround that was --without-java, I
>  see java-1.5.0-gcj-devel in the repo now so that's presumably
>  unnecessary now. 
I certainly hope so.  Lennert and I have done a lot of work to get gcj
working on ARM EABI, so if anything fails I'd appreciate a heads-up.
Yeah, I know it's rather slow.  :-)

Andrew.

-- 
Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, UK
Registered in England and Wales No. 3798903

[Lennert Buytenhek]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 09:23:10AM +0100, Oliver Falk wrote:

>  > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  > 
>  > The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  > little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  > Fedora packages have been built for ARM.
>  > 
>  > The Fedora/ARM architecture wiki page has more info:
>  > 	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM
>  > 
>  > The easiest way to start using Fedora 8/ARM is to download the
>  > prebuilt root filesystem, which can be booted in QEMU, or chroot'ed
>  > into or booted from on any ARMv5 or later processor running in little
>  > endian mode.  Additional packages can be installed by using yum,
>  > which is provided in the filesystem.
>  > 
>  > A HOWTO which describes getting Fedora/ARM running in QEMU is here:
>  > 	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu
>  > 
>  > There currently are a handful of known issues, which are described at:
>  > 	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO
>  > 
>  > Please help us by using the Fedora/ARM port and reporting any issues
>  > you run into so that we can fix them.
>  
>  I should have bought something else/bigger than my WRT54, I guess :-) 
Isn't the WRT54 MIPS based with 4M of RAM or so? :)

[Lennert Buytenhek]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 08:12:03AM +0000, Caolan McNamara wrote:

>  > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  > 
>  > The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  > little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  > Fedora packages have been built for ARM.
>  
>  FWIW, I ported OOo to arm-eabi last year, the "vanilla" rpms of the time
>  are at...
>  http://ooo.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/cws/upload/armeabip...
>  and that work is now integrated into 2.4.0 as in rawhide so in theory
>  for F9 it should build out of the box. 
Cool!  Is there any place that documents the changes necessary for
2.3 so that we can also provide a (separate) set of 2.3 rpms for F8?


>  At the time there was no ecj/libgcj port to arm-eabi so the extra
> flag
>  to OOo's configure required to workaround that was --without-java, I
>  see java-1.5.0-gcj-devel in the repo now so that's presumably
>  unnecessary now. 
Yep, in theory. :)

[Peter Robinson]

On Jan 17, 2008 2:40 PM, Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh(a)wantstofly.org&gt; wrote:
>  On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 09:23:10AM +0100, Oliver Falk wrote:
>
>  > > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  > >
>  > > The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  > > little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  > > Fedora packages have been built for ARM.
>  > >
>  > > The Fedora/ARM architecture wiki page has more info:
>  > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM
>  > >
>  > > The easiest way to start using Fedora 8/ARM is to download the
>  > > prebuilt root filesystem, which can be booted in QEMU, or chroot'ed
>  > > into or booted from on any ARMv5 or later processor running in little
>  > > endian mode.  Additional packages can be installed by using yum,
>  > > which is provided in the filesystem.
>  > >
>  > > A HOWTO which describes getting Fedora/ARM running in QEMU is here:
>  > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu
>  > >
>  > > There currently are a handful of known issues, which are described at:
>  > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO
>  > >
>  > > Please help us by using the Fedora/ARM port and reporting any issues
>  > > you run into so that we can fix them.
>  >
>  > I should have bought something else/bigger than my WRT54, I guess :-)
>
>  Isn't the WRT54 MIPS based with 4M of RAM or so? :) 
Yes I think so. They're Broadcom chips which I'm pretty sure uses a MIPS32 core.

But on the other hand my Dlink DNS-323 is a 500Hmz Marvell ARM chip. A
storage Fedora sub distro would be cool.

Peter

[Rabeeh Khoury]

>  
>  On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 00:33 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
>  > Hi all,
>  >
>  > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  >
>  > The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  > little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  > Fedora packages have been built for ARM.
>  
>  FWIW, I ported OOo to arm-eabi last year, the "vanilla" rpms of the 
time
>  are at...
>  
http://ooo.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/cws/upload/armeabi
po
>  rt01/
>  and that work is now integrated into 2.4.0 as in rawhide so in theory
>  for F9 it should build out of the box.
>   
Wow. I'v been fantasizing about this quite a time.
Can you please send the SRPM for that too?

Thanks,
Rabeeh

[Caolán McNamara]

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 15:46 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
>  Cool!  Is there any place that documents the changes necessary for
>  2.3 so that we can also provide a (separate) set of 2.3 rpms for F8? 
Should in theory just be

http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armoabiport01.patch
+
http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armeabi01.patch

Though if OOo fails to register components or start up then you
might need to make additional changes to some makefile.mks that
reference "VERSIONMAP" to reuse the i386 map files for arm, all of
which was fixed up for 2.4. I don't remember if its strictly necessary
to fix that in 2.3 or not.

C.

[Rabeeh Khoury]

>  On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 15:46 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
>  >
>  > Cool!  Is there any place that documents the changes necessary for
>  > 2.3 so that we can also provide a (separate) set of 2.3 rpms for F8?
>  
>  Should in theory just be
>  
>  http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armoabiport01.patch
>  +
>  http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armeabi01.patch
>  
>  Though if OOo fails to register components or start up then you
>  might need to make additional changes to some makefile.mks that
>  reference "VERSIONMAP" to reuse the i386 map files for arm, all of
>  which was fixed up for 2.4. I don't remember if its strictly necessary
>  to fix that in 2.3 or not.
>   
[RKh] I'v just tried installing the RPM packages; at the beginning it didn't work
well until I noticed that the binaries generates lots of unaligned accesses.
ARM kernel I'm using doesn't fix that for the user-space by default; so after
'echo 3 > /proc/cpu/alignment' and running soffice and importing a Microsoft
word doc I got the following amount of exceptions -

-bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment 
User:           125929
System:         0
Skipped:        0
Half:           27982
Word:           21780
DWord:          74940
Multi:          0
User faults:    3 (fixup+warn)

Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? Any idea if this can be fixed
too?

[Andrew Haley]

Rabeeh Khoury wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 15:46 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
> >     
> >> Cool!  Is there any place that documents the changes necessary for
> >> 2.3 so that we can also provide a (separate) set of 2.3 rpms for F8?
> >>       
> > Should in theory just be
> >
> > http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armoabiport01.patch
> > +
> > http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armeabi01.patch
> >
> > Though if OOo fails to register components or start up then you
> > might need to make additional changes to some makefile.mks that
> > reference "VERSIONMAP" to reuse the i386 map files for arm, all of
> > which was fixed up for 2.4. I don't remember if its strictly necessary
> > to fix that in 2.3 or not.
> >
> >     
>
>  [RKh] I'v just tried installing the RPM packages; at the beginning it didn't work
> well until I noticed that the binaries generates lots of unaligned accesses.
>  ARM kernel I'm using doesn't fix that for the user-space by default; so after
> 'echo 3 > /proc/cpu/alignment' and running soffice and importing a Microsoft
> word doc I got the following amount of exceptions -
>
>  -bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment 
>  User:           125929
>  System:         0
>  Skipped:        0
>  Half:           27982
>  Word:           21780
>  DWord:          74940
>  Multi:          0
>  User faults:    3 (fixup+warn)
>
>  Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? Any idea if this can be fixed
> too?
>     
Interesting.  I guess we'd want to fix this: unaligned access is so 
slow.  I'd break out a debugger and have a look.  Or at least I would if 
debuginfo weren't broke.  :-(

Andrew.

[Rabeeh Khoury]

Rabeeh Khoury wrote: 

	On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 15:46 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
	    

		Cool!  Is there any place that documents the changes necessary for
		2.3 so that we can also provide a (separate) set of 2.3 rpms for F8?
		      

	Should in theory just be
	 
	http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armoabiport01.patch
	+
	http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armeabi01.patch
	 
	Though if OOo fails to register components or start up then you
	might need to make additional changes to some makefile.mks that
	reference "VERSIONMAP" to reuse the i386 map files for arm, all of
	which was fixed up for 2.4. I don't remember if its strictly necessary
	to fix that in 2.3 or not.
	 
	    

 
[RKh] I'v just tried installing the RPM packages; at the beginning it didn't work
well until I noticed that the binaries generates lots of unaligned accesses.
ARM kernel I'm using doesn't fix that for the user-space by default; so after
'echo 3 > /proc/cpu/alignment' and running soffice and importing a Microsoft
word doc I got the following amount of exceptions -
 
-bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment 
User:           125929
System:         0
Skipped:        0
Half:           27982
Word:           21780
DWord:          74940
Multi:          0
User faults:    3 (fixup+warn)
 
Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? Any idea if this can be fixed
too?
  

Interesting.  I guess we'd want to fix this: unaligned access is so slow.  I'd
break out a debugger and have a look.  Or at least I would if debuginfo weren't broke.
 :-(



[RKh] The program counter of the failing instructions can be easily identified when you do
the ‘echo 3 > /proc/cpu/alignment’ since the kernel printk’s the failing instruction
and all will appear in /var/log/messages.

After looking in that log; I see that there is lots of repetition on the same program
counter; maybe the fixed at the end will be on 3 to 4 places only.

 

Regards,

Rabeeh

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2008, Rabeeh Khoury wrote:

>  [RKh] I'v just tried installing the RPM packages; at the
> beginning it 
>  didn't work well until I noticed that the binaries generates lots of 
>  unaligned accesses. ARM kernel I'm using doesn't fix that for the 
>  user-space by default; so after 'echo 3 > /proc/cpu/alignment' and 
>  running soffice and importing a Microsoft word doc I got the following 
>  amount of exceptions -
>  
>  -bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment 
>  User:           125929
>  System:         0
>  Skipped:        0
>  Half:           27982
>  Word:           21780
>  DWord:          74940
>  Multi:          0
>  User faults:    3 (fixup+warn)
>  
>  Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? 
Just do 'echo 5 > /proc/cpu/alignment', enable core dumps, and then run 
it again.  Then you just have to inspect the core file with gdb.

>  Any idea if this can be fixed too? 
Sure it can.


Nicolas

[Caolán McNamara]

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 19:01 +0200, Rabeeh Khoury wrote:
>  [RKh] I'v just tried installing the RPM packages; at the
> beginning it
>   didn't work well until I noticed that the binaries generates lots of
>   unaligned accesses. ARM kernel I'm using doesn't fix that for the
>   user-space by default; so after 'echo 3 > /proc/cpu/alignment' and
>   running soffice and importing a Microsoft word doc I got the following
>   amount of exceptions -
>  
>  -bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment 
>  User:           125929
>  System:         0
>  Skipped:        0
>  Half:           27982
>  Word:           21780
>  DWord:          74940
>  Multi:          0
>  User faults:    3 (fixup+warn)
>  
>  Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? Any idea if this can be fixed
> too? 
I'm sure its fixable and probably fairly simple, its just unfortunate
that qemu doesn't emulate that part of things so I can't see them
myself.

C.

[Linus Walleij]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:

>  We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture. 
This is a great day for Fedora, thank you Lennert!

Hm, my package libnjb does not build, no good. :-(

Linus

[Lennert Buytenhek]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 12:36:33AM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:

>  > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  
>  This is a great day for Fedora, thank you Lennert! 
Thanks. :)


>  Hm, my package libnjb does not build, no good. :-( 
It is built?

	f8-updates-arm/libnjb-2.2.6-2.fc8.armv5tel.rpm
	f8-updates-arm/libnjb-debuginfo-2.2.6-2.fc8.armv5tel.rpm
	f8-updates-arm/libnjb-devel-2.2.6-2.fc8.armv5tel.rpm
	f8-updates-arm/libnjb-examples-2.2.6-2.fc8.armv5tel.rpm

A consequence of not being hooked up in the main Fedora build system
is that we don't do builds in the same order as they are done on
i386/x86_64/ppc/ppc64.  By the time libnjb was queued for building,
an F8 update had already been issued for it, and the way we've set
things up means that the F8 base package won't be built anymore if
a newer version of the package (i.e. the update) has already been
built.

[Lennert Buytenhek]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 02:48:56PM +0000, Peter Robinson wrote:

>  > > > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n
> unofficial)
>  > > > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  > > >
>  > > > The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  > > > little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  > > > Fedora packages have been built for ARM.
>  > > >
>  > > > The Fedora/ARM architecture wiki page has more info:
>  > > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM
>  > > >
>  > > > The easiest way to start using Fedora 8/ARM is to download the
>  > > > prebuilt root filesystem, which can be booted in QEMU, or chroot'ed
>  > > > into or booted from on any ARMv5 or later processor running in little
>  > > > endian mode.  Additional packages can be installed by using yum,
>  > > > which is provided in the filesystem.
>  > > >
>  > > > A HOWTO which describes getting Fedora/ARM running in QEMU is here:
>  > > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu
>  > > >
>  > > > There currently are a handful of known issues, which are described at:
>  > > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO
>  > > >
>  > > > Please help us by using the Fedora/ARM port and reporting any issues
>  > > > you run into so that we can fix them.
>  > >
>  > > I should have bought something else/bigger than my WRT54, I guess :-)
>  >
>  > Isn't the WRT54 MIPS based with 4M of RAM or so? :)
>  
>  Yes I think so. They're Broadcom chips which I'm pretty sure uses a MIPS32 core.
>  
>  But on the other hand my Dlink DNS-323 is a 500Hmz Marvell ARM chip. A
>  storage Fedora sub distro would be cool. 
I'll hack up prebuilt kernel packages for a bunch of popular ARM
boards, probably once support for Orion (i.e. the ARM CPU you speak
of) hits mainline (it's queued for 2.6.25.)

[Lennert Buytenhek]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 05:12:42PM +0000, Andrew Haley wrote:

>  > -bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment 
>  > User:           125929
>  > System:         0
>  > Skipped:        0
>  > Half:           27982
>  > Word:           21780
>  > DWord:          74940
>  > Multi:          0
>  > User faults:    3 (fixup+warn)
>  >
>  > Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? Any idea if this 
>  > can be fixed too?
>  
>  Interesting.  I guess we'd want to fix this: unaligned access is so
>  slow.  I'd break out a debugger and have a look.  Or at least I would
>  if debuginfo weren't broke.  :-( 
Still on my TODO list. :-(

	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO

[Michel Salim]

On Jan 14, 2008 6:33 PM, Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh(a)wantstofly.org&gt; wrote:
>  Hi all,
>
>  We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture. 
Great news! Would it be possible to install this on Scratchbox?
Maemo's SDK is already using it.


-- 
Michel Salim
http://hircus.jaiku.com/

[Manas Saksena]

On Jan 17, 2008 4:13 PM, Michel Salim <michel.sylvan(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Jan 14, 2008 6:33 PM, Lennert Buytenhek
> <buytenh(a)wantstofly.org&gt; wrote:
>  > Hi all,
>  >
>  > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>
>  Great news! Would it be possible to install this on Scratchbox?
>  Maemo's SDK is already using it. 
Are you, perhaps, thinking of QEMU? Scratchbox is a tool to build
packages. We dont use it for Fedora/ARM as we build the packages
natively.

QEMU has an ARM emulator, and you can install and run Fedora/ARM on it.

Regards,
Manas

[Manas Saksena]

On Jan 17, 2008 6:48 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Jan 17, 2008 2:40 PM, Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh(a)wantstofly.org&gt; wrote:
>  > On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 09:23:10AM +0100, Oliver Falk wrote:
>  >
>  > > > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > > > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  > > >
>  > > > The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float,
>  > > > little endian.  The majority of the important and frequently used
>  > > > Fedora packages have been built for ARM.
>  > > >
>  > > > The Fedora/ARM architecture wiki page has more info:
>  > > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM
>  > > >
>  > > > The easiest way to start using Fedora 8/ARM is to download the
>  > > > prebuilt root filesystem, which can be booted in QEMU, or chroot'ed
>  > > > into or booted from on any ARMv5 or later processor running in little
>  > > > endian mode.  Additional packages can be installed by using yum,
>  > > > which is provided in the filesystem.
>  > > >
>  > > > A HOWTO which describes getting Fedora/ARM running in QEMU is here:
>  > > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu
>  > > >
>  > > > There currently are a handful of known issues, which are described at:
>  > > >     http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO
>  > > >
>  > > > Please help us by using the Fedora/ARM port and reporting any issues
>  > > > you run into so that we can fix them.
>  > >
>  > > I should have bought something else/bigger than my WRT54, I guess :-)
>  >
>  > Isn't the WRT54 MIPS based with 4M of RAM or so? :)
>
>  Yes I think so. They're Broadcom chips which I'm pretty sure uses a MIPS32 core.
>
>  But on the other hand my Dlink DNS-323 is a 500Hmz Marvell ARM chip. A
>  storage Fedora sub distro would be cool. 
Creating a storage sub-distro would be relatively easy if you restrict
to just taking a subset of packages, and not worry about breaking
dependencies (or using other tricks to bring footprint at a reasonable
level).

You could create it yourself by using the pre-built root file system
on QEMU and the adding/removing packages as appropriate.

Of course, one would also need kernel packages for each of the devices
like DNS-323.

Regards,
Manas

ps:

If you are more interested in a small footprint, embedded distro based
on Fedora for NAS (and other kind of devices such as wireless AP's,
home gateways, and such), then that is more work. We have done work in
that area, and would like to release it to the community soon. But,
keep in mind that, at that point, it can not be called Fedora. If
anyone is interested in that effort, then let us know, as that will
motivate us to get stuff out sooner rather than later.

[Michel Salim]

On Jan 20, 2008 2:16 PM, Manas Saksena <manas.saksena(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Jan 17, 2008 4:13 PM, Michel Salim <michel.sylvan(a)gmail.com&gt;
> wrote:
>  > On Jan 14, 2008 6:33 PM, Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh(a)wantstofly.org&gt; wrote:
>  > > Hi all,
>  > >
>  > > We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial)
>  > > Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.
>  >
>  > Great news! Would it be possible to install this on Scratchbox?
>  > Maemo's SDK is already using it.
>
>  Are you, perhaps, thinking of QEMU? Scratchbox is a tool to build
>  packages. We dont use it for Fedora/ARM as we build the packages
>  natively.
>  
I was thinking of Scratchbox -- it can actually use QEMU for CPU
transparency, allowing someone to work on a normal terminal window
without having to fire up an entire emulated OS.

The one thing that is nice about Scratchbox is it lets you
mix-and-match native and cross-platform binaries -- I've used it when
I needed to run some Intel-only tools when developing for ARM.

Will have to look up the Scratchbox documentation more closely to see
if it can be easily adapted to use any root FS images.

Thanks,

-- 
Michel Salim

[Rabeeh Khoury]

>  >
>  > Cool!  Is there any place that documents the changes necessary for
>  > 2.3 so that we can also provide a (separate) set of 2.3 rpms for F8?
>  
>  Should in theory just be
>  
>  http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armoabiport01.patch
>  +
>  http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armeabi01.patch
>  
>  Though if OOo fails to register components or start up then you
>  might need to make additional changes to some makefile.mks that
>  reference "VERSIONMAP" to reuse the i386 map files for arm, all of
>  which was fixed up for 2.4. I don't remember if its strictly necessary
>  to fix that in 2.3 or not. 
I resolved most of the F8-update openoffice srpm build dependencies and still the
'prelink package'.
I applied your two patches to the build but I'm failing on 'regcomp.bin' both
in %build and %install where it's eating all the memory and at the end being killed
for out of memory.
Did you have the same behavior? Can you please provide some lines what 'regcomp'
does in the build and how to start debugging this?

My system has 512MB DDR and 4GB swap. So there should be plenty of memory to build that.

Thanks,
Rabeeh

[Caolán McNamara]

On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 14:12 +0200, Rabeeh Khoury wrote:
>  I applied your two patches to the build but I'm failing on
>  'regcomp.bin' both in %build and %install where it's eating all the
>  memory and at the end being killed for out of memory.
>  Did you have the same behavior?  
No, but I built it "vanilla" style, not with rpmbuild and the .spec.
But do you have a build log for which regcomp is failing ?

>  Can you please provide some lines what 'regcomp' does in the
> build and
>  how to start debugging this? 
regcomp stands for register component so it should basically dlopen a
library (in the case of a C++ component, different but similar idea for
java/python components) and call a few of the component registration c
symbols and then write the name of the component and the returned
details of what the component implements into a .rdb file. Without
knowing what component when registered eats the memory I couldn't guess
if its a C++ one, a python one or a java one which causes the trouble.

There are some things in solenv/bin/modules/installer/globals.pm where
there are 

$unomaxservices = ...;
$javamaxservices = ...;

if you set those to e.g. 1 then during installation at least then there
should only be one library at a time passed to the registration process,
that might help isolate if it affects just one lib or *all* libs. But if
there was an OOM during the build then it won't affect that. Probably
best to start at the first problem. Where did it fail during build ? and
was OOo configured with or without java on arm ?

C.