[fedora-arm] ARM Primary FESCO discussion results, round 1

[Brendan Conoboy]

Hi everybody.  FESCO took its first official look at the ARM Primary 
feature proposal today.  There were a lot of great questions, valid 
concerns, and otherwise very useful feedback.  The end result is that 
we've been asked to engage more parts of the Fedora organization due to 
the massive scale of our request affecting so many portions of the 
community, then go through it all again next Monday.  Specifically we'll 
have to talk to Rel-Eng, QE, Kernel and Infrastructure groups to make 
sure they know what we're planning and have their potential concerns 
seen to.  We've done this casually on an individual basis previously, so 
this is a more formal inquiry, IE, an email thread to each of the 
groups' lists.  In addition, we'll have to address fedora-devel, but I'd 
like to delay doing that by a day until we've reached out to the 
previous 4 groups to get their feedback.  If anybody has time to do so 
in say, the next 24 hours, and would like to volunteer to address one of 
the groups that would be great.  Otherwise Jon or myself will do so.

Below are some details from the meeting for your comment and 
consideration.  Many of the FESCO members really want to see ARM succeed 
in PA- you can tell because they're asking the hard questions! Lets talk 
these out on the list, update the proposal, and get the other groups 
involved.


Questions from the meeting:

How are ARM-specific issues such as legacy alignment problems to be 
addressed?

How do packagers test and resolve failures on ARM if they don't own an 
ARM device?

When will server hardware be available?

Why isn't being a secondary architecture good enough?

Why not wait for 64 bit ARM?

With there being so many different kernel variants, how will a kernel 
build complete in a reasonable period of time?

The builds being done in Koji are great, but what is the plan for 
composes, QE and installation?

If Anaconda isn't used to do installations, what will be doing the 
things Anaconda does which just installing a bunch of packages doesn't? 
(I don't know what these are)

Will there be extra patches in the kernel to enable new vendors' ARM 
processors or will upstream continue to be the way?

What does the kernel team think about the the time required to build 
kernels on ARM? How will it affect their workflow?

The proposal suggests building just a versatile express kernel by 
default (to save time), then using koji flags to support alternate 
kernels.  Is this possible?

In the event that kernels are built separately per the above, what 
mechanism will be used to keep the kernels in sync?



Assertions from the meeting:

There must be a commitment of hardware both for build systems and test 
systems for PA.

Being a PA carries the obligation that all packages in Fedora will be 
available.  The proposed avenue of making broken packages temporarily 
excludearch is questionable and needs work.

FTBFS issues should simply be fixed (That's not an ARM problem, but 
we're definitely impacted by it).

The changes to QE, particularly because of Anaconda, will be 
substantial.  This is not addressed in the proposal.

Installability doesn't necessarily mean Anaconda (See EC2), but it does 
mean something.  A real plan is called for.

All PA kernels must be derived from the same source rpm.


That's it for now- I'll reply later with my own thoughts on the above.


-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com