RFC: Primary architecture promotion requirements

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Tue Mar 20 23:36:50 UTC 2012


On 03/20/2012 07:05 PM, Brendan Conoboy wrote:
> On 03/20/2012 10:44 AM, drago01 wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:56 PM, Brendan Conoboy<blc at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> Please, please, no. Cross compilation for Fedora cannot and will not
>>> ever
>>> get a secondary arch to primary. We're talking man-decades of
>>> engineering
>>> time to solve all the problems. Decades.
>>
>> Sorry I am not buying that.
>
> Because you have vast experience to the contrary? Look, even x86_64 is
> topping out on speed and moving to a more-core and more-systems-per-rack
> model. Cross compilation solves yesterday's problem, not tomorrow's.
Today's problem are:

1. sufficiently performant arms are not wide-spread
and
2. today's code is hardly tested on arms.


IMO, wrt. Fedora, unless a solution to 1. can be provided to the Fedora 
developer community, 2. can not be achieved and arm-Fedora will remain 
an illusion.

> If
> build speed truly is a fundamental issue to becoming PA the answer is to
> harness multiple systems for a single build, not to use a somewhat
> faster system to make up for the speed of a somewhat slower system.
> Scaling across more cores than fit in a single SMP Linux environment is
> the only sensible approach to future build speedups. Though is an
> interesting challenge, it is completely beyond the scope of primary
> architecture requirements. Please, let's drop talk of cross compilation.

I agree insofar as cross-compilation is a band-aid. However, sometimes, 
band-aids are inevitable.

Ralf




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