Fedora ARM Secondary Architecture

Introduction

Fedora Architectures

Fedora is an open source community that produces the Fedora Linux distribution -- a complete operating system (and more) consisting of thousands of software packages. This software is available free of charge complete with the source code, so anyone can use, distribute, and modify it to meet their needs.

The Fedora distribution supports two primary architectures; these are the primary targets for the packages in Fedora:

• i386 - 32-bit Intel/AMD - the chips that power most 32-bit computers, laptops, and netbooks
• x86_64 - 64-bit Intel/AMD - the chips that power most 64-bit computers and laptops

There are also a number of secondary architechtures, maintained by various groups within the larger Fedora community:

• ARM - A widely-used, low-power processor family commonly used for embedded and mobile applications, including cellphones and tablets
• 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 Fedora ARM Secondary Architecture project supports Fedora on ARM processors.

ARM Processors

ARM chips are the most popular CPU produced -- in excess of 5 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.

The 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 is increasingly important.

Another popular category of computers that uses ARM processors are Plug Computers.

Objective

Seneca is supporting the Fedora ARM initiative by hosting and managing a Koji build farm that shadows the primary architectures, so that every package built for the primary architectures (including updates) is be built for ARM.

The Fedora ARM Koji Buildsystem is accessible through a web interface and through the koji command-line tools provided as part of Fedora. Anyone with a Fedora account is welcome to build packages on it; if you do not already have an account wish to make use of the build system you can sign up using the Fedora Account System (fas2).

Status

• Currently building F13 under the supervision of Paul Whalen and Chris Tyler.
• See the ARM Hardware page for details of the build farm hardware.

Resources

Wiki Pages

• Seneca Wiki
  • Fedora ARM Secondary Architecture (Category)
  • Fedora ARM Koji Buildsystem
  • Fedora ARM Secondary Architecture/ARM hardware
  • Motion Sensor Interfacing for Panda Board based Dash Board System

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

Mailing Lists

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

Sites

• Using Fedora ARM with Qemu
• Koji software project site
• Booting OpenRD from SD
• SheevaPlug Update instructions
• Booting GuruPlug Server from SD

IRC

• Fedora ARM Build Master - Paul Whalen - PaulW or PaulW_cdot on irc://irc.freenode.net/fedora-arm
• Seneca Fedora-ARM Project Coordinator - Chris Tyler - ctyler on irc://irc.freenode.net/fedora-arm
• 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