(Backstory for those unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi board: The Raspberry Pi Foundation was formed by a group of industry leaders in Cambridge UK who believe that decreasing access to easily-programmable hardware is contributing the decline of interest in CS/IT among young people - compare the number of machines that booted to a programming prompt in the 80's with the number that do today. Their solution is to develop and sell a computer that's cheap enough and open enough that youth, schools, hackers, makers, and so forth will use it widely. Their first device is a $25/$35 ARM11-based computer). I've been working with a Raspberry Pi foundation (http://raspberrypi.org) and would like to see us (Fedora ARM) provide first-class support for their device. The foundation kindly supplied an alpha board, and we (at Seneca) have got F13 running reasonably well. There are still some significant hurdles -- for example, it has awesome 1080p high-def streaming video and OpenGL performance, but X11 is still painfully running on fbdev -- but these can be overcome, and I think that this will be a useful and important device. The Pi has a really strong GPU and an ARM11 (armv6) processor on a BCM2835 SOC. I anticipate that this device may sell into the millions of units in the next two years, and having Fedora as one of the primary operating systems will be beneficial both to the Pi users and to the Fedora community. The firmware blob on the GPU side is closed-source, but that side of the chip can be effectively treated as hardware; lobbing stuff (H.264, OpenGL, ...) over to the GPU through a socket-style interface causes stuff to happen. The kernel interface to the GPU side is open source. On the ARM side, there are a few small userland pieces that aren't yet open source, but hopefully will become so; therefore we'll initially need to provide a Remix (rather than a Spin) for the Pi, and should aim to switch this to a spin as soon as possible. The expected ship date for the Raspberry Pi is (early?) December (initial 10k units). If this device ships in quantity -- and it looks like it will -- I think we should at some point look at providing optimized armv6tel+vfp2 builds of key packages to improve performance; a student here is checking to see what level of performance benefits this could provide. My current focus is on trying to adapting the glamor X server to work with the GPU, while a few other folk here work on optimizing other pieces (boot, browser footprint, and so forth). We'll keep the list apprised as this progresses. Jon Masters and I are working on getting Red Hat and Seneca to fund the purchase of a few dozen boards from the first production run to distribute within the Fedora community. (These are exciting times for ARM! - Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone announcements on the low end, Calxeda and armv8 announcements on the high end :-) -Chris _______________________________________________ arm mailing list arm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
