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.
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
- Local mirror of ARM repositories
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- Set of standing VMs running the ARM image in emulation
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- mock configuration repository for ARM
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Resources
Wiki Pages
- Fedora Project wiki