[ Basically as found at
http://summit.linaro.org/lcq2-12/meeting/20696/linaro-general-q112-cross-dis...
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,