ARMv8 Bootstrap Project

[Al Stone]

Howdy.

It's time to announce a little project I've been working on for the last
few weeks: the ARMv8 bootstrap project for Fedora.

There has been a lot of interest in ARMv8 (also known as aarch64) in the
last few months since it was introduced by ARM.  A 64-bit processor that
uses as little power as possible could provide an enormous cost savings
to the vast and growing data centers throughout the world.

So, even though hardware is not yet available, we have started the work
needed to bring Fedora to ARMv8.  Using the ARM provided Foundation
model (a platform simulator for ARMv8), we have been building up the
packages needed to eventually get to a full native build of Fedora.
Details and current status are here:

    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/AArch64

Of the six stages needed in the bootstrap of a new architecture, we
are in the middle of stage 2; these are therefore pretty early bits.
In the interest of full transparency in what we do, and in the spirit
of release early and release often, grab a copy and have fun!

On the Fedora wiki, you will find instructions on where to find all
the bits and pieces used to construct the root file system image
that's been created so far, and how to use the ARM Foundation model
to do further work.  And there is plenty to do :).

If you'd like to help, read through the wiki pages above and get
yourself to the point where you can run the ARM Foundation model
using the Fedora root file system.  Then find a package needing
some love and do what needs to be done for ARMv8 (the wiki explains
how).

And if you have questions, you can find me (ahs3) on #fedora-arm on
IRC (Freenode), or ask on this mailing list; the more, the merrier.

-- 
ciao,
al
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Al Stone
Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.
ahs3(a)redhat.com
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