F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Peter Robinson]

>> They're not the primary focus of mainline Fedora either. We're
>> CURRENTLY focusing on development boards (100s of examples), desktop
>> like systems (Trimslice and other similar systems), netbooks/laptop
>> style systems and the various media centre style devices (STB/media
>> sticks etc), and servers.
>>
>> The reason we're not focusing on phones/tablets at the moment is a
>> number of reasons including things like user experience, resources and
>> other upstream support of those style of devices. The phone/tablet
>> manufacturers are dreadful at upstreaming things and the vast majority
>> of devices are locked (see also the bits of this thread about ARM
>> devices shipping Windows).
>
> You don't want to support devices that can't boot Linux, fair enough, but
> there's plenty of devices where we could run Linux, given a specific kernel.
> Seeing as the Fedora rootfs that are shipped for ARM don't include a kernel,
> I don't see what the blocker is here.

All supported ARM roots images include a kernel and have done so since
F-14 so I'm not sure where you get than information from. All our
kernels are upstream and use the Fedora mainline kernel package.

Any image that wants to use a kernel that is a non upstream mainline
Fedora kernel ships as a remix.

>> Also at the moment the vast majority of the Desktop UXes are a
>> dreadful experience on tablets whether that be x86 or ARM based.
>
> And not shipping something people can use to bootstrap development on those
> devices is going to help how?
>
> yum install @gnome-desktop
> probably took 3 hours on the device I tried it on, between downloading and
> installing those packages. Fedora having those rootfs/spins available will
> help bootstrapping the development of the UI on those devices.

I'm happy to create a remix image to assist in the bootstrap process
for you if that makes the developers lives easier. We decided not to
ship it as an official image because once there's an official image
there's an expectation from standard users that it works. If you'd
like me to assist with that can you contact me either off list or on
the ARM list and we can make that happen.

>> All of  the above will improve in time at which point there will be
>> more reason to focus towards that but to date we've been focusing on
>> other areas. That's not to say others can't focus on that if that's
>> their desire... it is after all Fedora.
>
> Why do you keep saying "it's not the focus" then? Why ship LXDE-based rootfs
> and not even ship similar rootfs archives for GNOME, even tagged as a development
> release?

I'm saying tablets and phones aren't the focus not that GNOME isn't
the focus, please don't confuse the two. See above about a development
image.

>> > I'm interested in Fedora on phones, tablets, tiny dongly media centers,
>> > set-top boxes, Wi-Fi routers and eBook readers. Why wasn't I allowed to
>> > have permissions to run image making on the ARM instances? I wanted to
>> > create a rootfs with gnome-shell as the default, similar to the desktop
>> > live CD, and couldn't because "it's not the focus". Why should the package
>> > maintainers carry the burden of maintaining packages that get compiled on
>> > ARM if their interests aren't "the focus"? I know I'd get yelled at if I
>> > started adding "ExcludeArch: arm" to my packages, so why is it OK for the
>> > ARM SIG to dismiss other Fedora contributors' interests, and actively
>> > block their attempts at making Fedora more available?
>> >
>>
>> I'm not sure what you mean by "Why wasn't I allowed to have
>> permissions to run image making on the ARM instances?". We decided not
>> to ship the gnome-shell spin for this release of ARM as out of the box
>> it wouldn't have worked
>
> It wouldn't have worked because nobody stepped up to fix LLVM in the ARM SIG.
>
>> and would have hence provided a terrible
>> experience. This was discussed in our weekly meeting.
>
> Tag it as a development/beta/whatever spin/rootfs and do it anyway.

People don't read that and still expect it to work.

>> There's nothing to stop someone doing a remix of gnome-shell with
>> third party drivers/kernels etc but unfortunately the way the spins
>> are build doesn't allow the use of third party repositories but this
>> is no different to the rel-eng policy for mainline x86 but then
>> there's nothing stopping it from being done on another ARM system and
>> many people have created remixes for both F-18 [1] and F-19 [2] so
>> we're not explicitly stopping you from creating a gnome-shell remix.
>
> Which brings me back to the question of why I haven't been allowed an
> account to create a spin using the Fedora build servers. I doubt that
> my 700 MHz/384 MB device is suitable for handling large packages and images
> to create a spin.

Do you have an account on the mainline x86 koji instance to create
images there? The lack of access to Fedora infrastructure is the same
for all types of infrastructure whether it be ARM or x86. I don't have
access to the ARM build servers either this isn't just you.

All the remix images to date have been created on the users own
devices. If you are internal to Red Hat there's process to get access
to internal infrastructure but you've not approached me about any form
of access to any sort of stuff or even approached me about options
available to create images, nor have you asked a question on the ARM
mailing list and I've not seen any queries on IRC (not to say I've not
missed it).

>> We've not been "dismiss other Fedora contributors' interests, and
>> actively block their attempts" in fact we actively encourage people
>> that are interested in rolling up their sleeves and helping out in
>> their particular interest area. You've emailed me directly about how
>> to create remixes and I've provided you details on how to do that and
>> if there's someone else who is causing issues please contact me off
>> list and I'll address that particular issue but I fail to see our
>> decision to not ship a spin that doesn't currently work as blocking
>> others ability to remix a spin as they choose as many others have
>> successfully done so.
>
> If it were an x86/x86-64 spin I wanted to create, I have access to plenty
> of machines, plenty of power, and plenty of storage. This isn't my case for ARM.
>
> If somebody were to send me an ARM device on which I can plug 4GB of RAM and a
> SATA hard-drive, I wouldn't be asking why I didn't get access to this build
> service to create spins. That's again not the case.

Who did you ask? I've not seen any queries on the mailing lists about
this problem. Have you asked internally what infrastructure there is
to Red Hat people?

>> As for "burden of maintaining packages that get compiled on ARM" I
>> don't believe you've had any extra burden, there have been very few
>> GNOME packages that have had compile issues on ARM and I believe for
>> the vast majority of those few that have the ARM team have fixed them
>> without any intervention required.
>
> Except the shell doesn't run, so we wouldn't know.

The shell does run with closed drivers so we do, it's been seen as
running by Rob Clarke as well on devices and there's a lot of gnome
that is usable with out the shell.

Ultimately I'm happy to help with your issues whether that be
appropriate access to HW for you to build images yourself or
assistance by spinning images on my own HW. Access to the Fedora ARM
build infra is limited to core infra people and that's the same across
both mainline and non mainline stuff but please post the questions and
queries about this to the ARM mailing list or email me so it doesn't
get lost because this is the first time I'm aware of your issues other
than the email you sent me about how to build an image which I replied
to you with the details and never heard anything further.

Peter