fedora for ARM

[Lennert Buytenhek]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 01:20:55PM -0500, Ralph Siemsen 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.

I see.  Last time we spoke you didn't appear to be very actively
working on netwinder anymore.  If you're still in the game, let's
try to combine our efforts -- I'd hate to find out in some months
from now that we've been doing exactly the same thing!

Are your packages available somewhere yet?


> 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.

Good thing you finally got your system back.  I'll see what I can do.


> >- 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.

This was indeed because of FC3 glibc doing unaligned accesses while
FC2 glibc didn't.  The alignment fixup handler didn't actually work on
big-endian (I'm on a big-endian box), so that was crashing apps using
the new gcc/glibc.  The alignment handler is fixed now, so I've turned
my build scripts back on.  It managed to compile about a hundred FC3
packages for ARM so far (including gcc/glibc/binutils), I'll upload
those soon.


> 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.

uClibc.. I'm afraid that too many pieces of Fedora depend on glibc.
But by all means, give it a try, if it works out I'm sure it'll be
for the better.

I'm ambivalent about hardfpa vs hardvfp vs softvfp.  What does debian
use, hardfpa or soft*?


> >- 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)

Many packages in Fedora include patches that make their Makefiles
hardcode -fpic or -fPIC -- bind, xinetd, krb5-utils, at, etc.  So
this is not a libtool issue.  This was also the case on FC2,
surprising you didn't run into it.


> >- 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 :)

Hmm, why so? :)  I didn't see (a pointer to) the actual gcc/glibc
patches though, do you have any ideas on where to get them?


> We'll probably also have to deal with SElinux as it sneaks into RPM.

I build my packages with selinux support but I never tried enabling
it.  It'll probably 'just work' though.


cheers,
Lennert