F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Jonathan Masters]

Excellent proposal. I of course think this would be just awesome!

-- 
Sent from my iPad

On Jul 9, 2013, at 15:37, Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik at redhat.com> wrote:

> = Proposed System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture =
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ARM_as_Primary
> 
> Change owner(s): Dennis Gilmore <dennis at ausil.us>, Peter Robinson 
> <pbrobinson at gmail.com>
> 
> Make ARM a primary architecture. Add armv7hl to the i686 and x86_64 as arches 
> that we build and support. This will mean that all packages supported by the 
> ARM architecture must build for ARM to be released. With the release of Fedora 
> 19 we have deprecated support for software floating support (ARMv5tel sfp) so 
> the only proposed addition to primary architectures is currently ARMv7 
> hardware floating point 32 bit support (ARMv7 hfp 32bit).
> 
> == Detailed description ==
> The Changing IT landscape has started to focus on greener technologies as well 
> as cheaper mass produced devices that allow for fully functional cheap devices 
> for lower socio-economic areas and other markets like education and "makers". 
> ARM SoCs have traditionally been the domain of embedded and mobile 
> applications but are now finding their way into more traditional computing 
> devices like desktop, notebook and server markets. Fedora ARM currently works 
> on many different devices with wider support coming with each new mainline 
> kernel release.
> 
> For this change we will enable armv7hl builds on primary koji, and compose arm 
> trees as with the other primary architectures. Fedora has in the Phoenix data 
> centre 96 quad core Calxeda EnergyCore server nodes. Some of these nodes will 
> remain allocated to the arm secondary architecture koji instance for building 
> updates for the current Fedora 18 and 19 releases. When Fedora 18 goes end of 
> life the ARMv5 softfp nodes will able to be be reallocated to other tasks. 
> Infrastructure has expressed an interest in testing and experimenting with 
> some of its workloads on ARM, some are allocated to QA and some for releng. 
> There is currently 24 nodes configured in primary koji ready to go as builders, 
> there is the capacity to add up to 24 more when ARM becomes primary if 
> desired.
> 
> The kernel is now a multi platform unified ARMv7 kernel supporting a number of 
> SoCs with support expanding with each new upstream release. We build a base 
> and LPAE variant similar to i686. There is an ARM specific (ARMv7 and aarch64) 
> kernel maintainer working in collaboration with the Fedora kernel team. The 
> releases are composed using the exact same tooling as used for the primary 
> architectures. Disk images for development boards are generated by appliance-
> creator and the kickstarts live in spin-kickstarts, they take a similar format 
> as the livecds on primary but are shipped as an OEM disk image, and like 
> primary initial-setup is used to do final user configuration. Like primary pungi 
> is used to generate an install tree, PXE install trees are created but current 
> bootloaders don't support isofs so ISO images aren't currently created. 
> 
> == Scope ==
> Add armv7hl to list of arches for f20-build and future build tags in koji 
> compose armhfp trees with i386 and x86_64. Requisite build hardware already 
> exists in phx2 and is configured to work with mainline koji.
> 
> Proposal owners: change the arches in koji, import the matching ARMv7 rawhide 
> builds into koji. Update Release Engineering scripts to automatically build 
> armhfp trees along with i686 and x86_64.
> 
> Other developers: submit builds as normal, in the event of unexpected build 
> failures liaise with the ARM Team to help debug and fix issues.
> 
> Release engineering: Will need to add armhfp to the release processes and make 
> arm install trees and disk images with each milestone compose. Release 
> Engineering are part of the team of people proposing the Change.
> 
> Policies and guidelines: armv7hl builds will be required to complete for 
> builds to be successful in koji 
> _______________________________________________
> devel-announce mailing list
> devel-announce at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce
> -- 
> devel mailing list
> devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel