Fedora ARM Secondary Architecture

Introduction

Fedora Secondary Architecture

Fedora supports two primary architectures:

• i386 - 32-bit Intel/AMD-compatible
• x86_64 - 64-bit Intel/AMD-compatible

There are also a number of secondary archs:

• arm - A widely-used, low-power processor family commonly used for embedded and mobile applications
• ia64 - Itanium
• pa-risc - HP Precision Architecture
• ppc - 32-bit Power PC
• ppc64 - 64-bit Power PC
• s390 - IBM mainframes (including z90 and z9)
• sparc - Sun RISC architecture

The ARM architecture is increasingly important, but has fallen behind the other secondary archs in terms of update frequency, number of packages successfully built, transparency of process, and integration with the other Fedora build processes.

ARM Processors

ARM chips are the most popular CPU produced -- approximately 1.6 billion are being made each year. These are being sold under a number of different brand names (ARM, StrongARM, XScale, Snapdragon) by a number of different manufacturers. Most of these are going into cellphones, but hundreds of millions are being used in other devices such as routers, NAS boxes, embedded controllers, tablets, and netbooks.

The new One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) hardware, model XO-1.75, will use an ARM processor. Since Fedora is used on the XO units, having a reliable ARM build of Fedora is going to become increasingly important.

Initial Plan

We're going to set up a Koji build system for ARM. Initially this will be based on the CDOT system HongKong. Initial ARM builders will use QEMU emulation, which will be replaced by ARM hardware when it arrives.

Resources

Wiki Pages

• Fedora Project wiki
  • fedora:Architectures
  • fedora:Architectures/ARM

• Fedora Mailing Lists
  • secondary - For discussion of secondary architectures
  • arm - For discussion of the ARM secondary architecture