Minutes from the Cross-Distro session at Connect (2012-05-31)

[Steve McIntyre]

[ Basically as found at

  http://summit.linaro.org/lcq2-12/meeting/20696/linaro-general-q112-cross-distro-1/

  but etherpad data has a lovely habit of going away over time... ]

Current Status
==============

Overall, everything works!! ;-) \o/

Fedora
======

Fedora 17 has been released for primary platforms, but not for
ARM yet. Still some remaining work.

 * OMAP4 "doesn't work" (crashes), likely due to reliance on pure
   upstream OMAP support rather than TI branches. Other distros have
   used TI patches.

 * Might be more similar issues around other SoCs that lack support in
   upstream kernel.

 * omapdrm support will wait until F18 (likely).

 * Still need to apply the arm hard-float linker path patches,
   including the hacky patch for supporting old and new SONAME

 * Still scrubbing code base for use of GCC locking intrinsics (or,
   rather where packages have rolled their own). Sharing patches
   considered good here.

 * "We suck" - Jon Masters

 * Normal installer not working for ARM, still using dd mechanism to
   flash images to cards.

 * Fedora are doing two ARM distros: v7 hardfloat (armv7hl) and v5
   softfloat (armv5tel). v5 will be supported for another couple of
   years, mainly for RaspberryPi users.

Debian
======

 * Architecture qualification underway for next release
   (Wheezy/version 7).

 * armhf (v7 hardfloat) is fully expected to be accepted as an
   architecture for the next release, but not *officially* labelled as
   such yet.

 * armel is still targetting ARMv4t; will continue to stay supported
   until absolute confirmation of no more devices in developer hands.

 * need banchmarks to check how much speed is lost with staying to
   armv4 and/or reasons from toolchain people why v4t is no longer
   supported/doesn't work. Time to open discussion about this again
   after the Wheezy release.

 * There's an *unofficial* port being made for for RaspberryPi
   (raspbian.org) ARMv6 hardfloat enabled for this (forward compatible
   with armhf). To support this better in future, would need
   additional support in HWCAPS to indicate which instructions are
   used in this binary/can be used on this hardware. Could use ELF
   headers for similar info for binaries. And corresponding info in
   package control file so dpkg can do something sensible (i.e. stop
   you installing v7 binaries on v6/v5 hardware.

 * Starting early ground work for ARMv8 port.

 * No omapdrm support in Debian due to "insane" use of 3.2 kernel for
   Wheezy

Ubuntu
======

 * Ubuntu 12.04 LTS released (3.2 kernel). Main ARM support is armhf
   (v7 hardfloat).

 * armel port used to be v7 soft-float, but is now slowly being
   downgraded from v7 to v5t. May be deprecated altogether in the
   future.

 * Quantal (12.10) will likely use Linux 3.5 kernel

 * LLVM built code not correct for armhf; under investigation.

 * janimo officially volunteered (by infinity) to resolve issues
   around Mono.

 * Starting early ground work for ARMv8 port.

General / actions
=================

As all the distros are going to be working on bootstrapping ARMv8,
plan to keep using the cross-distro list for discussion of
issues. Linaro will host a bug tracker to help people share work
better.

[ACTION] SteveMcIntyre to get BTS going

Steve's major Ruby issue on ARM (reported widely, see
http://bugs.debian.org/652674 for details) is resolved. Now we can
rely on getcontext/setcontext support in glibc, rather than on Ruby's
(broken) internal implementation from Ruby v1.9+. Re-enable the test
suites now!

[ACTION] Enumerate disabled testsuites across all distros and get them
         re-enabled

More regular cross-distro meetings (monthly conf call) considered
useful.

[ACTION] SteveMcIntyre to chase down DaveRusling about reviving
         cross-distro meetings.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve McIntyre                                steve.mcintyre at linaro.org
<http://www.linaro.org/> Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs