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

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 6:09 PM, Steve McIntyre
<steve.mcintyre at linaro.org> wrote:
> [ 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.

It now works fine. It's a bug in the CONFIG_OMAP4_ERRATA_I688 that
arrived in the 3.3 kernel. Disabled that and it now works fine.

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

The SoC's we support (omap, tegra, imx, kirkwood, highbank and
vexpress) all work fine with a few minor patches to fix build issues
and bugs. Most of the patches are just a few lines.

>  * omapdrm support will wait until F18 (likely).

No it won't, it will be in F-17 and is tested working. We had to pull
in a single patch that's not upstream to make this work.

>  * 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

I actually disagree with that sentiment strongly. We have over 11K
source packages built on ARM with not that much difference between x86
and ARM. We have java, eclipse and a number of other complex package
stacks built and working across a number of devices. We have gnome
with touch working. I don't see that we're much worse than others and
I think we've made a lot of progress, of course there's a lot more
work to do but we're certainly getting there.

>  * 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.

And for the kirkwood based plug devices as there seems to be many
variants of these that people are interested in using.

Regards,
Peter

> 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
>
>
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