[fedora-arm] Fedora ARM on the Raspberry Pi

[omalleys at msu.edu]

That is great news!!! I wasn't sure if raspberrypi was going to make  
it or not sounds like they are! :)

Would ARMv5tel+vsp2 (VSPv2 is optionally part of armv5.) cover this?

Just add VSPv2 to the current ARMv5tel mainline then a spin would be  
more trivial. This will also shake out bugs relative to just the vsp2  
instructions which might make low level debugging easier.

Or am I missing something?



Quoting Chris Tyler <chris at tylers.info>:

> (Backstory for those unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi board: The
> Raspberry Pi Foundation was formed by a group of industry leaders in
> Cambridge UK who believe that decreasing access to easily-programmable
> hardware is contributing the decline of interest in CS/IT among young
> people - compare the number of machines that booted to a programming
> prompt in the 80's with the number that do today. Their solution is to
> develop and sell a computer that's cheap enough and open enough that
> youth, schools, hackers, makers, and so forth will use it widely. Their
> first device is a $25/$35 ARM11-based computer).
>
> I've been working with a Raspberry Pi foundation
> (http://raspberrypi.org) and would like to see us (Fedora ARM) provide
> first-class support for their device. The foundation kindly supplied an
> alpha board, and we (at Seneca) have got F13 running reasonably well.
> There are still some significant hurdles -- for example, it has awesome
> 1080p high-def streaming video and OpenGL performance, but X11 is still
> painfully running on fbdev -- but these can be overcome, and I think
> that this will be a useful and important device.
>
> The Pi has a really strong GPU and an ARM11 (armv6) processor on a
> BCM2835 SOC. I anticipate that this device may sell into the millions of
> units in the next two years, and having Fedora as one of the primary
> operating systems will be beneficial both to the Pi users and to the
> Fedora community.
>
> The firmware blob on the GPU side is closed-source, but that side of the
> chip can be effectively treated as hardware; lobbing stuff (H.264,
> OpenGL, ...) over to the GPU through a socket-style interface causes
> stuff to happen. The kernel interface to the GPU side is open source. On
> the ARM side, there are a few small userland pieces that aren't yet open
> source, but hopefully will become so; therefore we'll initially need to
> provide a Remix (rather than a Spin) for the Pi, and should aim to
> switch this to a spin as soon as possible.
>
> The expected ship date for the Raspberry Pi is (early?) December
> (initial 10k units).
>
> If this device ships in quantity -- and it looks like it will -- I think
> we should at some point look at providing optimized armv6tel+vfp2 builds
> of key packages to improve performance; a student here is checking to
> see what level of performance benefits this could provide.
>
> My current focus is on trying to adapting the glamor X server to work
> with the GPU, while a few other folk here work on optimizing other
> pieces (boot, browser footprint, and so forth). We'll keep the list
> apprised as this progresses. Jon Masters and I are working on getting
> Red Hat and Seneca to fund the purchase of a few dozen boards from the
> first production run to distribute within the Fedora community.
>
> (These are exciting times for ARM! - Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone
> announcements on the low end, Calxeda and armv8 announcements on the
> high end :-)
>
> -Chris
>
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