openSUSE ARMs More Hardware, Gets More Build Power
THE INTERNET, April 15, 2013 -- The openSUSE ARM team is proud to announce
the immediate availability of openSUSE 12.3 based ARM images with support
for the Calxeda Highbank ARM solution as well as a variety of other SoC's.
Thanks to a deployment of Arndale boards with Samsung Exynos 5 Dualcore
CPUs, the Open Build Service on build.openSUSE.org has gained a significant
upgrade and development has been accellerated.
openSUSE 12.3, released March 7 2013, introduced ARMv7 as a fully supported
architecture. Due to the wide variety of hardware on the ARM platform, only
installation images for a selection of devices can be provided by the
openSUSE project and work on support more devices is an ongoing endeavor.
Today, stable images for various ARMv7 SoCs have been made available on the
openSUSE download servers. The most exciting are those for Highbank, the
codename Caldexa’s ECX-1000 series SoC system which presents one of the most
promising 32bit ARM boards for the server space. Aside from Highbank, images
for 11 other devices are now available with SOC's including the TI OMAP 3
and 4 series, Samsung Exynos 4 and 5, the Raspberry Pi and the Freescale
iMX51 and iMX53. The openSUSE ARM team is looking forward to feedback from
users of these platforms.
Technical collaboration with Samsung has resulted in additional build power
for the Open Build Service thanks to a deployment of native ARM Arndale
boards, providing dual core Samsung Exynos 5 CPUs. openSUSE employs the Open
Build Service to provide a centralized, powerful set of hardware freely
available for speeding up the building of packages and images by Open Source
developers. The ARM boards replace QEMU emulation on x86 with KVM
virtualization on native hardware and will provide swifter compile times for
updates and faster development.
The Open Build Service on build.opensuse.org now represents the first large
production deployment of KVM virtualization on ARM that we are aware off.
Seth Bernsen, Senior Director Ecosystem Development, Samsung Semiconductor,
Inc. said:
"We're excited to see the realization of the Arndale development board
platform as an enabler for innovative Open Source software development like
the openSUSE project."
The openSUSE ARM team has also been making steady progress on AArch64
support. Currently we provide over 5700 packages readily built for AArch64,
which means openSUSE currently delivers the biggest software pool for
AArch64, including Java, Python, Perl, PHP and related packages.
Find more details and an update on the current state of openSUSE ARM in the
Sneak Preview: https://news.opensuse.org/?p=15779
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