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.
Introduction
Our goal is 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. We have achieved the first part of that goal, Fedora ARM Koji is currently online and available to those with a Fedora account. If you do not already have an account wish to make use of the build system you can sign up Here.
Status
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. We are in the progress of building Fedora 13 and have just under 9000 packages built.
Current Tasks
| Task | Person | Status | Wiki Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build kernels natively and from SRPM | Chris Tyler | In progress | Kernels |
Resources
Wiki Pages
Mailing Lists
Sites
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