arm support of workstation product

[Peter Robinson]

> I don't have an issue with ARM (or PPC) builds of the workstation, but
> I don't think we should decide to make them officially supported platforms
> before we feel very certain there is a viable community and ecosystem around
> them to make the product workable medium to long term on those platforms.
> This means of cause the basic lithmus test of having the shell 'work' on a specific
> piece of hardware, but also there needs to be a viable roadmap for that hardware
> going forward. I mean I don't want a situation where we declare ARM supported
> because someone got a build working on a specific dev board, only to have the
> manufacturer of that devboard switch GPU provider in the next iteration and leave
> us without a working open driver.

Believe me you are not alone in that regard, it's a discussion the ARM
people have on a regular basis. We've already had one vendor and
another SoC go from hero to zero in a short period of time :-)

> Rob Clark is doing stellar work on Freedreno and the new Broadcom source code release
> is good news in this regard, but I think I personally need to feel that a
> officially supported ARM platform needs to be something we can believe will
> continue to exist and not a one shot 'the stars aligned for us' situation.

Personally I'm not sure either of those are of much value. The QCom
devices are primarily used in phones which aren't really targets for
Fedora ARM. There's currently one dev board I'm aware of and it's not
widely available and it's not currently anywhere on our roadmap when
it comes to the kernel.

The Broadcom one would possibly be of interest if there was a usable
driver and HW we could support of which there is neither at the
moment.

The two platforms that are of interest to me and I think will provide
us value in the short to medium term is SoCs with the Vivante GPU of
which there is an open driver that is very close to supporting mesa.
These cover the i.MX6 devices of which we already will support well
over a dozen discrete devices in the F-21 timeframe, the ARM based
OLPC XO laptops, and a bunch of differing Marvell SoC based devices.
The other platform is the Tegra K1 devices which will be supported by
nouveau and are a being announced in decent devices like netbooks,
likely chromebooks and all in one style desktops.

> There is also a question of what kind of hardware we want to support here,
> for instance if someone made ARM based laptops or desktops that seems like an
> obvious target, but officially supporting something like the RasperryPi or PandaBoard
> seems maybe something of an overkill. A homebrew devboard seems like it can be
> 'supported' well by just having an unofficial build for it.

There's already a bunch of mini desktops based on the aforementioned
i.MX6 and there's an interesting array of devices that are not
dissimilar to a large tablet on a stand all in one style devices but
with keyboard and mouse attached, of course there's various netbooks
esq devices too. Fedora ARM isn't interested in phones and similar as
I just don't believe they would provide a decent user experience with
the workstation product.

Peter