[fedora-arm] Any opinions on ODROID-XU ?

[Peter Robinson]

>> No, it means booting a single kernel on multiple SoCs. Basically going
>> back to prior to 3.7 we had to have a different kernel for each SoC
>> (tegra/imx/highbank/omap/versatile) and now we have a single kernel
>> for pretty much everything. DT tends to be one of the things that come
>> with that but it's not necessary or dependent.
>
> OK, device tree describes the layout of the hardware.  What other
> sorts of differences between SoCs need to be considered?  (I thought
> that ARM instruction sets were compatible within ARM versions?)

Mostly. There's some differences as some devices don't have NEON (like
SSE), and A8, A9 etc evolve with newer instructions but then that's no
different to x86 either but generally yes.

> The reason for asking all this is I'm trying to understand what's
> going on with the hardkernel ODROID-XU Linux tree.

Primarily it's implementation. The various SoCs would basically (I
don't know the full and exact details) implement certain calls
differently on the various SOCs so that depending on how you compile
the kernel it can change, the "unified" multi platform kernel is about
cleaning that all up and essentially being able to identify the
different implementations at runtime similar to how the x86 detects
Intel vs AMD vs Via implementations.

Peter