Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Wed 4th Apr 2012 06:45 UTC
"The ARM architecture is growing in popularity and is expected to expand its reach beyond the mobile and 'small embedded' device space that it currently occupies. Over the next few years, we are likely to see ARM servers and, potentially, desktops. Fedora has had at least some ARM support for the last few years, but always as a secondary architecture, which meant that the support lagged that of the two primary architectures (32 and 64-bit x86) of the distribution. Recently, though, there has been discussion of 'elevating' ARM to a primary architecture, but, so far, there is lots of resistance to a move like that."
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RE[3]: Comment by EvaTheDog
by Bill Shooter of Bul on Wed 4th Apr 2012 13:33
in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by EvaTheDog"
Member since:2006-07-14
[Right now I don't think that Fedora on ARM is doable but I applaud their attempt to make it happen.
Agree. They need to figure out how to reduce the compile time for the ARM ports. From the article it says it takes over a day as compared to an hour and a half for x86. By the time they solve that problem, I imagine a standardized ARM architecture should emerge. I just hope all of the systems are not secure boot locked out of booting anything other than win 8.
RE[4]: Comment by EvaTheDog
by Alfman on Wed 4th Apr 2012 14:06
in reply to "RE[3]: Comment by EvaTheDog"
Member since:2011-01-28
Bill Shooter of Bul,
"I just hope all of the systems are not secure boot locked out of booting anything other than win 8."
One step forward, a hundred steps back.
I know there's no bios standard for ARM platforms, but does any know just how different the arm variants are in practice? Is it just a matter of missing the platform configuration tables to initialize the system, or are things really that incompatible in the kernel/drivers that we'd need dozens of different kernels?
Would it be feasible to have a shim layer for each ARM variant, but use one ARM kernel?
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And a forth. And soon enough a fifth. You have ARMv5 and ARMv7 and you should soon enough have a new 64-bit ARM ARMv8. This complicates things a bit. Furthermore, it's hard to support a distribution for ARM given that there are no generic ARM systems available yet.
Every configuration for almost every ARM system should be hardcoded at compile-time and if you're planning to support 100 different ARM systems might find out that you need 100 kernels.
Linux needs to auto-detect the hardware available to it such as frame buffers, i/o devices, etc. Most ARM systems out there (mobile phones for example), don't have any auto-detection features and only work with hardcoded defaults and this just won't work.
Future ARM systems will work just right with Fedora as they will be closer to following a standard. They will use UEFI as a firmware, they will have a standard PCI bus, etc.
Right now I don't think that Fedora on ARM is doable but I applaud their attempt to make it happen.