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 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.

Goal

To support the Fedora ARM initiative by creating and managing a Koji build farm that will koji-shadow the primary architectures, so that every package built for the primary architectures (including updates) will be built for ARM.

Plan

Initial Plan

We're going to set up a Koji build system for ARM. Initially this will use the CDOT system HongKong as the hub.

Status

As of 2010-08-14: The Fedora ARM Koji system is up and running; it is currently building F13 under the supervision of Paul Whalen and Chris Tyler. We have 22 hardware ARM builders at present (see ARM Hardware) which include 20 GuruPlug Server Plus, 1 BeagleBoard XM and an OpenRD Client.

Links

• Koji-web interface

Current Tasks

Task	Person	Status	Wiki Link
Build kernels natively and from SRPM	Chris Tyler	In progress	Kernels

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
• Booting GuruPlug Server from SD http://paulfedora.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/installing-fedora-12-on-a-guruplug/

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