On Thu, September 22, 2011 5:41 pm, Guillaume Gardet wrote:
Le 22/09/2011 16:56, Greg KH a écrit :
We are going to be targeting ARMv7 nothing older I'm afraid this means CORTEX-A8 and above (looking at A9 primarily and then the new A15 when it's available), it gets too messy otherwise and it is already messy enough.If you have knowledge and experience, please help out. If you don't take part you have no justification to complain - you've got to be in it to win it ;-) I know we talked about this at the openSUSE conference, and I'm glad
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 03:05:44PM +0100, Andrew Wafaa wrote: that you are starting to kick this off, it's great.
But, what specific machine are you targeting this to run on to start with? We need some kind of specific platform to aim for besides a semi-vague processor level, in order to get a valid kernel and tool-chain up and running. The kernel specifically is going to be a bit difficult as each individual platform needs tweaks in order to have it work properly due to the lack of discoverable busses (device-tree work notwithstanding).
In other words, what box do I need to go buy in order to help make this possible? :)
I think we need more than 1 board to check the port. I think Beagleboard, Beagleboard xM or a Pandaboard could be a nice board to develop openSUSE on ARM (in addition to qemu).
Firstly, we have to decide what kind of ARM processor we want to support. I think we should target ARMv7 and above Application processor family (Cortex A8, A9 and above) to have enough "power" to run openSUSE. I think we will have poor performances with ARMv5 for openSUSE. Then, we have to decide which optimization (in GCC) we want to enable. I would say : - ARM EABI with ARMv7-a instructions - VFP (vector floating point) - thumb/thumb2 instructions if possible (some packages do not compile with thumb or thumb2 enabled) - NEON (not all processor have it, maybe enable it as an option for video libraries for examples to have good performances)
I think that if you look at the time that it'll take to have a stable distro, I think it would be best to focus on the Cortex A9 (hardfp etc) with or without NEON. Why start with a distro that is already based on "old" hardware. Nearly all tablets are using a Cortex A9 (mostly in the form of a Tegra 2). That has one small downside. This one doesn't have a NEON FPU at least not one that meets the full specs. What are the plans for a openSuSE ARM distro. Where should it run on? I think as a distro it would be useful to have it running on a tablet like the Asus Transformer and upcoming ARM Cortex A15 servers.
Interesting pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microprocessor_cores http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
I have experiences in embedded Linux and I have a beagleboard xM, so I can help if you want. But I have no experiences in RPM packaging.
I would like to take part. I have Pandaboard (OMAP4430) and Toshiba AC100 (Tegra2).
AFAIK, someone worked on ARM port some time ago in google summer of code. It could be nice to know what have been done.
Cheers,
Guillaume
Joop. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org