[fedora-arm] Support for ARMv7, hardware math

[Andy Green]

On 12/01/10 18:37, Somebody in the thread at some point said:

Hi -

> 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.

Infrastructure evidently already exists to knock out armv5 packages.

> 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

Several years ago I made my own rpm-based cross-build system similar to 
this.  You meet packages like perl, which as part of its build process 
created a "miniperl" that it then ran to complete the build process. 
Except when you build cross, the miniperl executable is an ARM 
executable on an x86_64 box and it can't complete the build process.

Most packages are not that tough but there are still enough funnies that 
instead of knocking bugs out in some awesome fast cross environment, you 
are running around discovering and solving cross-specific bugs.

> 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).

qemu arm is a dead loss for mass build, it's a fraction of the speed of 
native execution on even a weak arm.

> 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.

If it was the case that arm will never approach x86 speeds, then cross 
is worth worrying about because it will solve years of speed 
differential by a large effort now.

But that is not the case, fast arm native platforms are already here and 
will only get faster in the future.  Cross and arm emulation are not the 
solution and won't become the solution either.

-Andy