F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Till Maas]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 12:35:36PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 12:00 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 6:25 AM, Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Speaking about hardware - and that's more a question for Spot - could
> >> be possible to organize another round of HW give away as we did with
> >> Raspberries? With a different HW, that's supported in Fedora and it
> >> seems like there are pretty cheap options either. With some metrics,
> >> like commits/packages/packages that need significant effort to make
> >> it working on ARM...
> >
> > The sentiment is nice, but I don't think that last hardware give away
> > went all that well.  Also, to get something competent is going to cost
> > money.  I have no idea what the Fedora budget looks like, but frankly
> > I'd rather use money on something more beneficial than buying hardware
> > for a bunch of people that aren't already working on ARM.  It will
> > likely have a shiny factor of about 1 week, and then it will sit on
> > their desk collecting dust.
> 
> I agree, not sure what the contribution to the RPi stuff was like but
> for the XOs that were given away I'm not aware of a single
> contribution to any of the Fedora/OLPC/Sugar projects as a result of
> it.

IMHO it is also not that easy to get something going with ARM on Fedora.
For example I bought a Sheeva-ARM devices to get upstream release
monitoring running on it . But even when I got it installed,
the device crashed with a kernel soft lockup. Now the devices are no
longer supported. I got a RPi (from the hardware summer of fun) with the
same intent, but until today it is not properly supported and won't. In
the meantime I bought a Cubieboard, no luck here as well. Since the
Cubieboard remix even requires HDMI output and does not work headless, I
did not try it because if missing HDMI hardware. Also all the Fedora ARM
efforts usually require to dd some images instead of just allowing to
run a textmode anaconda via serial or some other installer, which just
feels quirky.

So now I gave up and bought a x86_64 microserver, which will then do the
release monitoring among other things.

Regards
Till