[ Based on notes from

http://summit.linaro.org/lce12/meeting/20963/cross-distro-standardisation-di...

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

This was a general cross-distro session for discussion about ARM issues. There was also a more AArch64-specific session on Tuesday morning as part of the v8 mini-summit; I'll post notes from that next!

Distros/groups represented ==========================

* Debian * Ubuntu * Fedora * Baserock * openSUSE * OpenEmbedded

Existing ports ==============

v7 hard-float is basically done by everybody. Steve McIntyre mopping up last bits (glibc/binutils/ABI doc, mostly multiarch/multilib cleanup). TODO: it would be nice to get the binutils hf/sf ABI patches into the binutils 2.23 branch. It looks like the runtime linker stuff is just about finished!

Question about Cortex-A15 kernel support, especially LPAE. Looks like distros will need to ship 2 kernels for ARMv7 in this case: LPAE/non-LPAE. There is no current way to merge these, and no plans.

ARMv8/AArch64/arm64 ===================

Many distributions are starting work on porting to AArch64. Linaro have released an initial OpenEmbedded-based filesystem which will work in ARM's v8 models. Toolchains are available too:

http://www.linaro.org/engineering/armv8

Hopefully this will help the distros bootstrap. There are "aarch64" tags that should be used when filing bugs in various Linaro projects (gcc-linaro, linux-linaro, linaro-oe, etc.)

There's also a shared bug tracker at

https://launchpad.net/linaro-aarch64

for distros to use, so we don't waste time working in parallel on the same bugs for AArch64 support. When using this, please file bug reports in-distro first and link to these. Once fixes are accepted upstream, mark the linaro-aarch64 bugs fixed.

Distro AArch64 status =====================

* Ubuntu: * http://wiki.debian.org/Arm64Port * https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/CrossCompile/arm64bootstrap * Raring has all components required for armv8 cross toolchain * Debian * http://wiki.debian.org/Arm64Port * Fedora * Jon Masters has scanned the package set for assembler code, identifying probable pain-points

Tools =====

Steve working on strace support - 64-bit is done, working on using 64-bit strace with 32-bit binaries next. Ptrace patches for gdb are submitted, but until things stabilise people will need to match up kernel and tools to get things working here.

Standard install instructions for distros? ==========================================

Some discussion about how different various of the ARM boards are in terms of setup; could/should we talk to them and give recommendations on making them easier to work with? Ideas:

* Default boot process in server world is UEFI+GRUB. Stick with that. * Partition layout recommondation (FAT partition for UEFI?) * Would distros and board makers follow such doc if it existed or will everyone prefer to "add value" in this area? * Linaro should write doc with default recommendations, which in long term should reduce variation and feed into SOC manufacturer boot code

Network booting ===============

Lots of people are interested in this, especially for installing clusters of machines like Calxeda/Dell offerings. How should people do this? 'Use PXE' doesn't really help. There is PXE support in uboot, developed by Calxeda. Is anybody working on PXE support in UEFI? Linaro Enterprise Group should...

We could do with some recommendations for how this area should work - prod the LEG people!

Cheers,