F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Rob Clark]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Adam Jackson (ajax at redhat.com) said:
>>> If we really wanted to talk about graphics on arm, we'd be talking about
>>> writing drivers for GPUs.
>>
>> Is there any use to shipping freedreno and similar projects in Fedora ARM
>> before they get to the upstream kernel? (I expect a brickbat from Josh
>> fairly quickly for suggesting this.)
>
> I've been following the tegra and lima (Mali 400) upstream work pretty
> closely but neither is actually usable for gnome-shell yet to be
> worth, IMO, even to be packaging it in a third party package. In he
> case of the freedreno while the work is cool the qualcomm SoC is
> primarily shipped on phones and tablets [1] which isn't our primary
> focus so while would be cool to support I'm unsure what the user
> experience would be like if we did ship it. Side note there is
> upstream multi platform support for the MSM SoCs now but I have no
> idea how complete this is (eg AllWinner MP support is upstream but
> it's still only core SoC/serial/mmc)

fwiw, there are a few boards.  Various iterations of dragonboard[1]..
much cheaper than the pre-low-cost-community-board dev-boards of years
gone by, but still a little bit on the pricey side.  And then there is
the inforce ifc6410[2] which is what the dragonboard should have been
all along.

Sadly it seems the devicetree support (which would be needed for
multi-platform) is coming in newer SoC's than the apq8064.  Or older
(s3/msm8660).  So for out of the box multi-platform fedora kernel, I
think we are talking about some eventual successor to the ifc6410
board.

I should note that the freescale iMX5.x devices also have an adreno
a200 GPU.. which I've not had a chance to add support for yet, but it
is on my TODO list somewhere.  Along with a lot of other things.
Although I'm not sure that I'd want to try to run gnome-shell at 1080p
on this one.

BR,
-R

[1] http://mydragonboard.org/
[2] http://www.inforcecomputing.com/product/moreinfo/ifc6410.html

> Peter
>
> [1] I've seen one dev board
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