On 04/25/2012 12:07 PM, Andrew Wafaa wrote:
Hi Kim,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, I was on leave with limited net access.
1.) Who are the main people behind the openSUSE ARM team? I suppose the "core" team numbers about 12 people, it is not just SUSE employees working on it but is actually a fairly even split of external/internal contributors. To name a few people Adrian Schröter, Alex Graf, Andreas Färber, Marcus Schäfer, Peter Czanik, Guillaume Gardet, Joop Boonen, Dirk Müller, Michal Hrusecky, and of course myself - Andrew Wafaa. The thing is that as it has to do with the wider distribution we get other members of the project jumping in too, for instance Andreas Jaeger has jumped in to help with glibc and gcc. Not only do we have people from openSUSE helping out, but we also have people from other ARM related projects helping - Carsten Munk from the Mer project, Steve McIntyre from Linaro, Steev Klimaszewski from Gentoo & Genesi, and many others not directly involved with openSUSE but have are involved in ARM.
2.) What's the main purpose of the project? Pretty simple really, make sure that openSUSE can fully support the ARM architecture moving forward and also enable the distribution to be used on low powered hardware. ARM powered devices are everywhere, from tiny embedded devices to the emerging server market. ARM is in things like vehicles, aircraft, set-top boxes for your TV, network routers, mobile phones, tablets, netbooks, the list goes on. We want to be able to ensure that openSUSE is a first class citizen in the latter segments - so predominantly the appliance/more general compute loads.
3.) How far do you get? Are there any goals that have been achieved so far? We are making pretty good progress. We have several images available for installation on different devices, Pandaboard{ES}/Beagleboard{XM}/Beaglebone/EfikaMX. We still have a way to go though. Saying that, some of the goals we have set out have been acieved, for instance we have Kiwi support for the creation of ARM images, many of our "fixes" for ARM have been submitted to and accepted by the respective development projects for inclusion in the core distribution.
4.) Will there be a release of the ARM edition? We intend to do an ARM release, but I can't confirm when. Our intention is to have it available in time for 12.2, but it might not. At the very least we will have a Beta release at the same time as 12.2GM
5.) What differentiates openSUSE ARM versus other projects' ARM initiatives? Nothing and everything :-) As a fairly new start in the ARM arena we thought it best to not try and re-invent the wheel, so we looked at our peers and saw what they have done; we were able to then cherry pick the components and that best suited us. So we have a good mix of things that Fedora have implemented and things that Ubuntu have implemented. We utilise the OBS for building in the same way that the core distribution does so the barrier is already lowered for contributions, we have implemented the hard-float linker path that has been championed by Linaro, we are focused on ARMv7 and above using hard-float. That is not to say that ARMv5/v6 can't be achieved, just that the team's main focus is on v7 - if you want v5 or v6 for your device (say the RaspberryPi?) the you can jump in and help get that up to scratch.
Beside this, it also would be nice to tell us something about the team in general, and you guys work. If you want to, you could also add some information about joining the team or goals that need to be achieved to reach the next milestone. The team is very friendly and is spread out around the world as is the nature of open source projects (although there is a high concentration in Europe). It is a real community effort as those employees of SUSE don't work on it as part of their day job but rather as a side project (at least at the moment, things could change :-) ). So if you are interested in getting openSUSE working well on ARM then jump on IRC and head to #opensuse-arm on Freenode and join the opensuse-arm mailing list (it isn't a noisy list, and has no bike-shedding). Also it is worth joining the Linaro run Cross Distro mailing list[0].
If you have any other questions, please shout and we'll try and be more punctual with responses. Also if anyone else has any input then please let Kim and the others hear it!
Regards,
Andy 0 = http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/cross-distro
thanks for the answer! I will pick up it and create an article asap. thanks a lot, --kdl -- With the lights out, it's less dangerous -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-arm+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-arm+owner@opensuse.org