F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 7:41 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 2:04 AM, Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> On 07/10/2013 09:13 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Fedora is an operating system that supports a range of desktop
>>>> environments, defaulting to the GNOME desktop environment. An OS that
>>>> supports headless servers but not desktop environments might be based on
>>>> Fedora, but it wouldn't be Fedora. As such, it wouldn't be suited to
>>>> being a Fedora PA.
>>>
>>>
>>> It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish whether to read these
>>> messages as high standards or hyperbole.  Maybe your Fedora means desktop
>>> OS, but my Fedora has more facets than that.  Fedora Primary is not some
>>> Platonic Form embodied by x86; that would be better described as Fedora
>>> Fantasy.
>>
>> I will note that it is not x86 alone.  If one is simply going by "as
>> close to the current Fedora experience the current Primary offers",
>> then the PowerPC secondary arch team is actually ahead of ARM.  I'm
>> not saying they are a better candidate, but I am pointing out that the
>> criteria Matthew is alluding to is being met by non-x86 architectures.
>
> Ahead in what metrics?  In terms of packages built ARM is ahead, in
> terms of kernel I don't believe it's easy to compare as ARM has a much
> wider range of HW available from multiple vendors. In terms of
> features like HW virt that's possibly true (but there's other features
> that I'm not sure are even possible with PPC that ARM does) and in
> terms of maturity of support it's most definitely true that PPC is
> ahead.

In terms of Fedora experience.  You install it graphically via
Anaconda.  You wind up with Gnome (or LXDE or XFCE) and can run it.
Yum works.  Security features are implemented and working.  Etc.
These are the things Matthew is alluding to.

Anyway, my point isn't to say THOU MUST HAVE GNOME or focus on one
particular feature.  I am merely to point out that it isn't an
x86-only discussion as there are other platforms that are certainly
right up there.

>>> There were concerns about build times, particularly that of the kernel: We
>>> bought the fastest hardware available, moved to a unified kernel
>>> architecture and sped up builds many-fold.
>>
>> And yet did not include any of that information in your proposal.  I
>> believe build times have improved.  I also believe that you should
>> show it in the proposal so that it is clear you are addressing prior
>> concerns.  I'm appreciate the effort spent to speed up the kernel
>> build times, but the concern is global.  Show the work done in the
>> proposal with some simple numbers.
>
> I don't believe it should be included in the proposal, in supporting
> docs yes but the proposal is an overview not a justification doc.

That's fine.  I didn't necessarily mean a big graph in the middle of a
wiki page, so sure.  At the moment, there is nothing supporting the
proposal at all.  It reads as "here's some marketing stuff about IT
landscapes and cheap devices", followed by two paragraphs of good
technical description of what secondary ARM looks like today, followed
by a list of needed changes.

What I'm looking for is supporting data on prior concerns and what
both the ARM team and the Fedora project gain from making ARM primary.
 Again, the proposal is lacking in the why area.  "You get ARM!" isn't
cutting it because you've all done such a good job that Fedora already
has ARM on the same day as x86 and PowerPC.

josh