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

[Gordan Bobic]

Brendan Conoboy wrote:

> Questions from the meeting:
> 
> How are ARM-specific issues such as legacy alignment problems to be 
> addressed?

Are alignment problems not considered bugs? It's not just that this will 
break code on ARM < v7 and IIRC SPARC, but alignment issues also cause 
cache line straddling which has a performance impact.

> 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)

Is there any actual reason why Anaconda cannot be used? What is to stop 
booting a suitable installation kernel for the target platform and 
having that fetch/mount an installation rootfs that takes over, same as 
it does in x86? Granted the amount of RAM is an issue, but that's just a 
case of dieting the installer back to a saner size (de-lobotomizing the 
text mode installer back to how it was before F11, for example).

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

I found that if the kernel has support for the right SoC, it is simply a 
case of adding a suitable SoC merge config file and plumbing it in for 
the build based on a build flag. I have somewhere a 
2.6.32-220.<something> kernel src.rpm that builds for both x86 and 
Marvell Kirkwood, and it was reasonably straightforward to achieve (even 
if it did require fixing a few bugs that were introduced by upstream 
vendor patches that didn't manifest on the primary arch).

Gordan