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

[Andrew Wafaa]

Aloha,

On Mon, 2012-03-19 at 21:00 -0400, Chris Tyler wrote:
> > How do packagers test and resolve failures on ARM if they don't own an 
> > ARM device?
> 
> There are several solutions available:
> 
> 1. They can use emulation. Fedora already includes a good-quality ARM
> emulator (qemu-system-arm) that provides decent performance; we can
> package ready-to-run ARM images for that emulator. (This emulator can
> provide Kirkwood execution speeds on a modern x86 PC).
> 
> 2. ARM computers can be bought for as little as $35 (the Raspberry Pi).
> 
> 3. Packagers can use Koji for remote scratch builds (just as someone who
> only has 32-bit x86 can use Koji for 64-bit x86 builds).
> 
> 4. We could consider setting up remote access to ARM systems (though
> this doesn't provide a lot of benefit over option 1 in most cases).
> 

Please excuse me if you feel I'm being somewhat cheeky with this, but I
genuinely think it could be of benefit to Fedora (and also openSUSE).

As some may know openSUSE uses the Open Build Service[0] for all its
packaging. It is similar to Koji but not quite the same. Our current
setup is to build using the public instance[1] which uses qemu for ARM
emulation, similar to what Chris is proposing. What we also have is a
small native ARM build farm (mostly pandaboards, with some efikas) that
verifies build failures on the OBS. We have found quite a few packages
fail under emulation vs native, and have subsequently submitted patches
upstream for both qemu and the respective packages.

So why am I suggesting Fedora consider the OBS? In a nutshell it means
that more of your community can chip in with an easy(ish) tool, without
having to have decent hardware to hand for running the emulator. I'm not
saying it is a perfect tool, but it does work and we (the openSUSE
community) would be more than happy to help where we can.

Just an option for your consideration :-)

Regards,

Andy

0 = http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Build_Service
1 = https://build.opensuse.org/  

-- 
Andrew Wafaa
IRC: FunkyPenguin
GPG: 0x3A36312F