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 there's a lot more that could be done 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, Armada, Cortex, OMAP, Sheeva, Snapdragon, XScale) 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.

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

Plan

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.

Current Tasks

Task	Person	Status	Wiki Link
Koji Hub setup - PostgreSQL master	Arlene Daniel	In Progress - Goal of March 22	Koji Database
Koji Hub setup - Koji Hub configuration	Paul Whalen,Sadiki Latty		Koji Hub
Koji Hub setup - Certificates/security	Sadiki Latty		Koji Certificates
Koji Builder setup - Shared filesystem	Mashfique Haque		Koji shared filesystem
Koji Builder setup - Koji Build Daemon	David Cabral		Koji Builders
Performance - iSCSI vs. NFS vs. Local USB disk	David Chisholm	On Hold for iSCSI	Storage Performance
Initial mock tests on ARM	Everyone	80%	Initial Mock Compilation Tests
Research and create image for F12 on OpenRD-Client	Paul Whalen	In progress
NFS setup - HongKong to VMs	David Chisholm	Completed	NFS Configuration
Networking with NAT to connect OpenRD	Sadiki Latty	In Progress	NAT
Revise mock config and .repo files in release RPM	David Cabral	53%	Repos
Build kernels natively and from SRPM	Chris Tyler	In progress	Kernels
Set up F12 on OpenRD-Client	Chris Tyler	100%	OpenRD-Client
Set up F12 on SheevaPlug	Alex Pvlahopoulos	In progress	SheevaPlug

Completed Tasks

1. Local mirror of ARM repositories
   • David Cabral
   • David Chisholm
   • Daniel Gilloch
2. Set of standing VMs running the ARM image in emulation
   • Sadiki Latty
   • Paul Whalen
   • Arlene Daniel
3. mock configuration repository for ARM
   • Chris Tyler

Resources

Wiki Pages

• Fedora Project wiki
  • fedora:Architectures
  • fedora:Architectures/ARM
  • fedora:Koji
    • fedora:Koji/ServerHowTo
    • fedora:Koji/Policies

Mailing Lists

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

Sites

• Koji software project site
• Booting OpenRD from SD: http://blog.thebehrens.net/category/tinkering/
• SheevaPlug Update instructions: http://chiana.homelinux.org/~marc/eib_sheeva.html

IRC

• Secondary Arch lead - Dennis Gilmore - dgilmore on irc://irc.freenode.net/fedora-devel or irc://irc.freenode.net/fedora-arm
• Fedora-ARM community - irc://irc.freenode.net/fedora-arm
• Koji community: irc://irc.freenode.net/koji