========================= = Bits from ARM porters = ========================= Quite a few things happened recently around Debian/ARM; some random news follow Official buildds ================ Thanks to the efforts of Riku Voipio, ARM and Canonical have generously provided us with bunch of fast ``armel'' machines and hosting at ARM Holdings Ltd, the hardware specifications are in db.debian.org [0]. Four of these are now buildds, bringing the total of armel buildds to seven. In other words, ``armel'' should no longer lag behind other architectures when building unstable packages. One of the machines (abel.debian.org) has been setup as a porter box. It is faster (around 3x) than the older porterbox (agricola). All Debian Developers have access to the porter boxes. The new buildds have allowed us to enable more suites. Thanks to Philipp Kern's work, ``armel'' builds now ``experimental'', ``lenny-volatile'', ``lenny-backports'' as well as ``unstable/non-free''. Especially if you are ``stable'' Debian user, access to backports and volatile should make life easier. Hardfloat ARM port ================== The next big thing is the hard-float ARM port [1] (aka ``armhf'') effort being lead by emeritus Debian Developer, Konstantinos Margaritis, hired by Genesi (markos). First do note that the ``armel'' port is NOT going away! The majority of ARM CPUs sold today still don't have a floating point unit (FPU), so the soft-float port (``armel'') will still have a long life ahead. Meanwhile, the ``armhf'' port will provide a more optimised platform for people with the latest ARM cores (ARMv7 + VFP) shipping on mobile phones and netbooks, with powerful multimedia and graphics support. There has been some debate about the relative merits of an ABI-incompatible new port that maximises speed gains over a slower armel-compatible port/build optimised for ARMv7 + VFP + Thumb2, and various alternative courses have been proposed to keep compatibility and improve performance. However, ``armhf'' is currently the only solution being actively worked on. Konstantinos announced on debian-arm [2] a temporary ``armhf'' repository [3] available from his site. ``armhf'' porting work is slowly migrating to debian-ports.org which received a hardware donation for additional storage from Genesi-USA. If you have capable hardware and would like to try out the ``armhf'' port, we are currently evaluating and trying to benchmark ``armhf'' against ``armel'' (both in Debian and Ubuntu), we would be happy to hear about your results on the debian-arm mailing list [4]. So far ``armhf'' shows a clear gain over ``armel''. Linaro bits =========== Linaro is a not for profit organisation sponsored by manufacturers with interest in ARM and with engineers from a variety of companies (ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, CodeSourcery and Canonical) to accelerate and improve ARM development. [5] It does both upstream work notably on the toolchain and on the kernel, and distro-like integration work. The ``armhf'' port currently uses the Linaro toolchain instead of the FSF one because of missing support for hard-float in FSF GCC 4.4. The Linaro toolchain is based on the FSF toolchain and features ARM patches from Sourcery G++ as well as new developments, backports, and bug fixes. This toolchain is currently used in Ubuntu x86 and ARM architectures, and the packaging is done by Matthias Klose, just like for the FSF toolchain; it would be painless to opt to use it for the ``armel'' port, the toolchain maintainer simply expects the Debian ARM porters to request this change if that's their wish, but has no opinion on using Linaro GCC on Debian ``armel''. Almost all patches are going into FSF GCC upstream and the ``armhf'' port could switch to GCC 4.5 when it's ready, but that could take some time. However, Matthias would not like to use Linaro GCC on other architectures than ARM (except perhaps SH4); x86 in particular should not use a different toolchain branch, since x86 is generally the reference platform. Another option is to put Linaro patches into Debian GCC source, but not actually enabled by default to make it easy to use for those that care. Linaro works on many other ARM topics relevant to Debian: multiarch, cross-compilers (in partnership with the Debian Embedded team), root file systems for ARM devices based on Debian/Ubuntu; find out more on their website [6]. Pending nibbles =============== It is possible to provide optimised libraries for specific hardware, but questions still remain on which approach is the best and most scalable one. How could Debian integrate optimised libraries for ARM variants (libc6-vfp)? ``debian-installer'' should gain support for installation onto MTD NOR/NAND Flash in the partitioner. Support for custom kernels would also be nice. Hardware donations ================== Outside of the buildds and debian-ports storage mentioned earlier, Debian received donations in the form of developer boards. * ARM hardware donations: * 2 Nvidia Tegra2 dev boards (jeremiah, spyro) * Genesi hardware donations: * 14 EfikaMX TO3 (fixes NEON hardware bug) * 6 EfikaMX TO2 (has a NEON hardware bug, suitable for buildds) * 2 x 2TB Hard-disk for debian-ports.org (aurel32) * EfikaMX (TO3) to Debian project: * Debian-Edu (vagrant, jonas, h01ger) * Debian-Embedded (codehelp, zumbi) * Debian-Live (dba) * Debian-Kernel (maks, tbm) * Debian Qt/KDE (svuorela) * Debian Installer (otavio) * Debian ARM hf port (Clint, lool, markos) * EfikaMX (TO2) * Buildd network cluster: 15xTO2 (markos, zumbi) Thanks ====== Genesi for hardware and manpower support and ARM for hardware donations. Many other individuals involved in Debian/ARM (you know who you are) and many other companies related to Debian/ARM effort. [0] One random machine's specifications http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi?host=alwyn [1] https://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2010/08/msg00008.html [3] http://freevec.org/repository/ [4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/ [5] http://www.linaro.org/arm-freescale-ibm-samsung-st-ericsson-and-texas-instruments-form-new-company-to-speed-the-rollout-of-linux-based-devices/ [6] http://www.linaro.org/ http://wiki.linaro.org/ Best regards, -- Héctor Orón "Our Sun unleashes tremendous flares expelling hot gas into the Solar System, which one day will disconnect us." -- Day DVB-T stop working nicely Video flare: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100510.html
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