cross-distro June 2012

cross-distro@lists.linaro.org

7 participants
2 discussions

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

by Steve McIntyre

[ Basically as found at http://summit.linaro.org/lcq2-12/meeting/20696/linaro-general-q112-cross-di… 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(a)linaro.org <http://www.linaro.org/> Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs

12 years, 7 months

Minutes from the ARMHF status discussion at Connect (2012-05-29)

by Steve McIntyre

[ Basically as found at http://summit.linaro.org/lcq2-12/meeting/20695/linaro-general-q112-armhf-st… but etherpad data has a lovely habit of going away over time... ] Current status ============== Just about done in the distros! * Released in Ubuntu 12.04 * About to be accepted as a release architecture in Debian * Fedora 17 * openSUSE (12.2?) * ChromeOS switched to hard-float (recently) We finally got agreement on the runtime linker path for arm hard-float. All the distros have incorporated the changes for that now *except* Fedora; they're planning to do it Real Soon Now. Benchmarks ========== The early comparisons not clear (differing hw, distro, compilers), difficult to get directly comparable numbers out. The latest set from Konstantinos are almost complete - see https://wiki.linaro.org/OfficeofCTO/HardFloat/Benchmarks201205 for a comparison of Ubuntu 12.04 armhf/armel on a Panda board. Somebody needs to finish off the GUI test results. Overall, numbers as expected. Some graphics-heavy and FP-heavy code wins (povray! some media encoding), most integer code comparisons are neutral. Remaining work ============== Work is proceeding on ELF markers/segment definition for ABI. Time to actually implement the PT_ARM_ARCHEXT segment in binutils and (e)glibc. SteveMcIntyre working on this. We need to clearly document what the hard-float ABI is. Plan to incorporate into or copy the existing soft-float ABI doc at Mentor nee Code Sourcery. Java is still a mess: * http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/downloads/javase/index.html ARMv7 Linux - Headless - Server Compiler * EABI, VFP, SoftFP ABI, Little Endian* * possibly would work with ubuntu/debian multiarch Mono is currently not hardfp and needs work to fix it up. Jani (janimo) might be a good candidate to fix mono, if we can get some of his time libffi gained variadic support last year; wasn't used much so far ctypes would need patching to use new variadic support in libffi but ctypes isn't maintained upstream anymore; probably not worth it. Other places where libffi users may be broken. Gnat: * Current port works but not great * Needs resources to do the real port Ruby is still exhibiting some crashes in testsuite on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, considered likely to be a glibc locking bug. [ACTION] UlrichWeigand and SteveMcIntyre to setup a hacking session this week to try to look into this. RESULT: problem solved - see http://bugs.debian.org/652674 for more details. Raspberry Pi ============ Brief discussion. It's known that the Pi can support hard-float if recompiled for ARMv6 in ARM mode (e.g. unofficial Debian rebuild at http://www.raspbian.org/). General consensus from the distros: not interested in doing such ports officially, but we love the community doing so. Cheers, -- Steve McIntyre steve.mcintyre(a)linaro.org <http://www.linaro.org/> Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs

12 years, 7 months

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cross-distro June 2012