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

[Brendan Conoboy]

On 03/20/2012 02:48 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> 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.

I took this question to be a case of 
knowing-just-enough-about-ARM-to-be-harmful.  It's really a non-issue, 
particularly since later ARM chips don't have the problem.

> 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).

Anaconda isn't *quite* ready to go yet.  And you don't actually gain 
much by using Anaconda for many devices- you still have to write an 
image to a removal storage device.  Which you then run boot... and it 
writes a new image to a storage device.  You've just made more work for 
yourself when you could have installed a working image directly.

On the server side, PXE abilities mean there's more to be said about 
Anaconda support.  The only issue is, they don't exist yet :-P

> 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).

Yes, using one kernel source rpm is working fine for us.  It's the long 
build time which needs to be overcome.

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