fedora for ARM

[Ralph Siemsen]

Lennert Buytenhek wrote:

> The netwinder project seems pretty dead to me, but maybe there are some
> souls on this list interested in helping out in some way?  Some things
> that need attention are:

It only seems dead... the autobuilder is alive, but its located in the 
back woods (eg. my house) where there is no permanent internet 
connection.  Hence no visible updates... but it was last seen working on 
FC2 packages.

Andew and I have been looking for a place to host netwinder.org itself, 
now that the actual box is back in our hands... this is necessary since 
netwinder.org is currently being hosted on Andrew's crusue system, and 
it does not have nearly enough disk space to hold all the autobuild 
files.  We would ideally also like to find a place with better upstream 
connection than a home DSL circuit.

> - The FC3 port got stuck pretty early on due to (a general lack of time
>   and) FC3's glibc exhibiting strange alignment issues on ARM.  Perhaps
>   has something to do with ARM bug ID 2473/1.  Need to check this out.

I am strongly tempted to try building against uClibc, and with targeted 
soft-float toolchain (eg. no NWFPE).  Not sure how far this will go, but 
the basic toolchain works nicely... I have been using it for the "new" 
firmware.

> - A lot of Fedora packages compile their binaries (not libraries) with
>   -fPIC, and this currently doesn't work on ARM.  The 'solution' for
>   FC2 was to patch all those packages to omit -fPIC.

That's likely a libtool issue - or do you see explicit -fPIC in the 
package sources now (I haven't looked at current SRPM pools)

> - Perhaps __thread support.  Nicolas Pitre's ARM TLS patch went in
>   recently, need to look into what gcc/glibc support is needed for this.

If you made it all the way through that mailing list thread, 
congratulations :)  We'll probably also have to deal with SElinux as it 
sneaks into RPM.

> And perhaps some attention can be spent on the insane dependency loops
> new ports need to handle.  (Anyone has any idea how many non-X packages
> depend on the X libraries, either directly or indirectly?)

Initial bootstrapping is a pain indeed... going forward from a working 
environment is generally simpler.

-Ralph