Hi everybody. FESCO took its first official look at the ARM Primary
feature proposal today. There were a lot of great questions, valid
concerns, and otherwise very useful feedback. The end result is that
we've been asked to engage more parts of the Fedora organization due to
the massive scale of our request affecting so many portions of the
community, then go through it all again next Monday. Specifically we'll
have to talk to Rel-Eng, QE, Kernel and Infrastructure groups to make
sure they know what we're planning and have their potential concerns
seen to. We've done this casually on an individual basis previously, so
this is a more formal inquiry, IE, an email thread to each of the
groups' lists. In addition, we'll have to address fedora-devel, but I'd
like to delay doing that by a day until we've reached out to the
previous 4 groups to get their feedback. If anybody has time to do so
in say, the next 24 hours, and would like to volunteer to address one of
the groups that would be great. Otherwise Jon or myself will do so.
Below are some details from the meeting for your comment and
consideration. Many of the FESCO members really want to see ARM succeed
in PA- you can tell because they're asking the hard questions! Lets talk
these out on the list, update the proposal, and get the other groups
involved.
Questions from the meeting:
How are ARM-specific issues such as legacy alignment problems to be
addressed?
How do packagers test and resolve failures on ARM if they don't own an
ARM device?
When will server hardware be available?
Why isn't being a secondary architecture good enough?
Why not wait for 64 bit ARM?
With there being so many different kernel variants, how will a kernel
build complete in a reasonable period of time?
The builds being done in Koji are great, but what is the plan for
composes, QE and installation?
If Anaconda isn't used to do installations, what will be doing the
things Anaconda does which just installing a bunch of packages doesn't?
(I don't know what these are)
Will there be extra patches in the kernel to enable new vendors' ARM
processors or will upstream continue to be the way?
What does the kernel team think about the the time required to build
kernels on ARM? How will it affect their workflow?
The proposal suggests building just a versatile express kernel by
default (to save time), then using koji flags to support alternate
kernels. Is this possible?
In the event that kernels are built separately per the above, what
mechanism will be used to keep the kernels in sync?
Assertions from the meeting:
There must be a commitment of hardware both for build systems and test
systems for PA.
Being a PA carries the obligation that all packages in Fedora will be
available. The proposed avenue of making broken packages temporarily
excludearch is questionable and needs work.
FTBFS issues should simply be fixed (That's not an ARM problem, but
we're definitely impacted by it).
The changes to QE, particularly because of Anaconda, will be
substantial. This is not addressed in the proposal.
Installability doesn't necessarily mean Anaconda (See EC2), but it does
mean something. A real plan is called for.
All PA kernels must be derived from the same source rpm.
That's it for now- I'll reply later with my own thoughts on the above.
--
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc@xxxxxxxxxx
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