Fedora on ARM

[Misha Shnurapet]

Hello.

To those who follows the developments (and, in particular, the recent CES 2011), the trend towards personal MIDs and tablet PCs is not just promising but logical. Quite a few major vendors, such as Dell (with Streak and so-called 'M02M'), RIM, Samsung, Motorola and Sharp (with Galapagos) revealed their plans to deliver ARM-based touch screen computing devices to consumers worldwide. Along with ready-to-use solution providers, Qualcomm showed-off its dual-core Snapdragon CPU, there has been news on Tegra of NVIDIA. According to analytics, the year of 2011 is to be the rise of MIDs and that of biting a nice piece of desktop and laptop niche.

I have a question. What does it mean for Fedora?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 23:00 +0800, Misha Shnurapet wrote:
> Hello.
>
> To those who follows the developments (and, in particular, the recent
> CES 2011), the trend towards personal MIDs and tablet PCs is not just
> promising but logical. Quite a few major vendors, such as Dell (with
> Streak and so-called 'M02M'), RIM, Samsung, Motorola and Sharp (with
> Galapagos) revealed their plans to deliver ARM-based touch screen
> computing devices to consumers worldwide. Along with ready-to-use
> solution providers, Qualcomm showed-off its dual-core Snapdragon CPU,
> there has been news on Tegra of NVIDIA. According to analytics, the
> year of 2011 is to be the rise of MIDs and that of biting a nice piece
> of desktop and laptop niche.
>
> I have a question. What does it mean for Fedora?

We have a Fedora ARM project -
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM - and it's quite active
at the moment, there was a very interesting talk on it at FUDCon (I
don't know if we have a transcript or recording) by Paul Whalen. We have
Fedora running already on quite a few bits of ARM hardware. For the
consumer market (ARM is also very interesting for embedded usage), the
major issue is graphics hardware; none of the graphics chips commonly
used in ARM systems have drivers that are remotely suitable for Fedora
from a licensing perspective. The big hope there is the next version of
the OLPC, which will be ARM-based and have an open graphics driver for
at least 2D; the hope is that the chip from the OLPC will find its way
into other ARM devices, and then we'd have a good driver for those too.

Paul and/or Peter Robinson would be able to provide you with further
details if you're interested.