Fedora ARM Secondary Architecture

Introduction

Fedora Secondary Architecture

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:

• 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 archs:

• 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

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.

Objective

Here at Seneca we're supporting the Fedora ARM initiative by creating and managing a Koji build farm that shadows the primary architectures, so that every package built for the primary architectures (including updates) will be built for ARM.

The Fedora ARM Koji system is currently online. 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

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

• 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

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

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