I agree with you about the beagleboard but two two others things will be available in a few months. A low-cost netbook (200$) with freescale platform (before this summer it seems and with ubuntu-arm i believe) and a similar thing with qualcomm (don't know when). This two products will be less "geeky" than beagleboard and more usable (or attractive) for the average joe.
As you said, the big trouble with ARM is, except instructions set, a lot of things change from one CPU to another : GPU, SIMD, ... It remember me the old days of first PC GPU : an API from each manufacturer. It may be a drawback in a near future as i'm not sure mplayer, xorg, openssl, ... can use these SoC at their full potential.
Regards,
Frank
2009/3/16, Adam Miller maxamillion@gmail.com:
Frank, Thanks for the reply and for the information. I'm already a package maintainer for Fedora but I wasn't sure what the procedures would be for ARM since there doesn't appear to be a build target for the ARM arch in the infrastructure.
I'm currently an undergraduate in computer science (will be graduating in May) and I want to pursue operating systems research for my graduate work and if I am lucky, Ph.D work as well so I would like to end up developing kernel level or systems level for the ARM platform. The beagleboard really has most of my attention at the moment just because I think it is quite the interesting device and see a lot of potential for it. I guess I should have worded my request for information better, but I was wondering what needs to be done system level or kernel level as far as porting to ARM (specifically the beagleboard) or if it has already been done and fedora can be installed on the beagleboard, is there anything that I could help test development (and hopefully contribute fixes to, etc.). I really am just finding myself stuck in the middle of a completely different architecture than I'm used to (the lack of uniformity across the architecture is the biggest change) and I was hoping to find some guidance on where to target my efforts.
My main goal up front is to spin a beagleboard image so that users of the beagleboard who want to install fedora would have a potentially "easy" way of doing so. Probably not the traditional install method, but something somewhat easier than rolling their own from the toolchain as described on the wiki.
Thank you for your time, -Adam
EDIT: Sorry for the double post, didn't hit "reply to all" so that it would also go to the list. Just wanted the reply to go to the list in case someone else wanted to jump in. Thank you again for your time.
On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Frank ultima.ratio.regum69@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Adam and welcome,
What do you need exactly when you say you want to develop on ARM platform and what kind of software do you want to develop (or port )?
ARM platform is a vast world, if you only look at four Cortex-8 CPU, you'll find that they are quite differents : OMAP3 (beagleboard) http://focus.ti.com/dsp/docs/dspcontent.tsp?contentId=53403 iMX515 http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=i.MX515 PXA168 http://www.marvell.com/featured/pxa168.jsp Snapdragon : http://www.qctconnect.com/products/snapdragon.html#TechnicalFeatures
For more information about ARM architecture, you'll find some good technicals data on ARM website (need to register but it's free). http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?noscript=1
For more ressources about a CPU (OMAP, ...), you'll probably find info on TI, Freescale, Marvell, Qualcomm, ... website. For OMAP3530 (beagleboard) : http://focus.ti.com/dsp/docs/dspfindtoolswbytooltype.tsp?sectionId=3&tab...
How to maintain Fedora packages : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers
I'm not sure i've correctly answer your questions, but i hope this help you a bit.
Regards,
Frank
2009/3/16, Adam Miller maxamillion@gmail.com:
Hello all, I'm new to the ARM world, but I've been reading up a bit and am looking into purchasing a beagleboard (http://beagleboard.org/) as a learning platform and possibly to do something useful once I've learned enough. I was hoping I could get some direction towards materials on learning to develop for the ARM platform, most importantlywith respect to fedora. I've read the fedora wiki page on the ARM architecture as well as the toolchain page and was just hoping to find some guidance from there. I was also wondering if there was an outline somewhere of work needing to be done for the Fedora-ARM project so that I may contribute once I am able.
Thank you, -Adam
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