On 31/01/2011 21:03, Niels de Vos wrote:
>> I'm looking into getting an ARM system as small
home-server. Of course
>> I'd like to run Fedora on it, but unfortunately it seems that current
>> Fedora releases are not completely ready for this yet.
>
> It's probably ready enough. F12 is the stable one, and F13 alpha rootfs
> is available. A few things are missing (a few important KDE parts, but
> they do build OK on F12), and a few things are broken and unstable
> (Firefox of the F12 vintage isn't of generically good enough quality to
> handle bug-free running on ARM), but overall it's more than usable
> enough. I run a F12/F13 hybrid (F12 rootfs yum updated to F13 alpha from
> the koji repository where packages update cleanly) on my Sheevaplug
> (Kirkwood ARMv5) and on my Toshiba AC100 (Tegra 2 ARMv7), and they work
> quite well - certainly well enough for any common server tasks.
>
> You may want to check the archives and sign up to the redhat bugzilla
> where bugs are tracked. I submitted a patch recently to add a feature to
> rc.sysinit that changes the default kernel behaviour about alignment
> errors. I suggest you apply it and set the default to fix+warn and file
> bugzilla reports for all the apps that cause these warnings.
>
> Here's a direct link to the bugzilla report:
>
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=673691
Cool! I'm complete unaware what makes ARM a special architecture, so
this is quite interesting. I've added some notes/thoughts to the bug,
maybe it helps to get it included ;)
Thanks. I won't hold my breath for it, though. :)
>> While I am checking the details of qemu and libvirt, I am
wondering if
>> there is a kernel available that has virtio support. If not, I will
>> need to compile my own kernel, which feels a little silly.
>>
https://arm.koji.fedoraproject.org does only seem to have one kernel
>> package available, and that is kernel-headers which I hardly can use
>> for booting. I am wondering if there are any scratch-builds available
>> that have a functioning vmlinz.
>
> You will almost certainly need to build your own kernel anyway, because
> kernels on ARM are pretty CPU specific. While it has recently been
> mentioned that there is a project underway to provide a small-ish set of
> kernels to try to cover a majority of popular ARM devices, right now you
> will almost certainly want to build your own kernel.
Hmm, thats good to know. I was just hoping that there is something
like a general basic arm kernel with all the modules, which boots on
most boards, but would run sub-optimal.
No such thing at the moment. If you look through the kernel
configuration options, there is no "generic" option - you have to select
pretty specifically what you want it to run on, and there's no
multi-choice on CPU selection.
> ARM emulation using qemu on x86 is OK for minor things to begin
with,
> but performance is quite crippling.
>
> As for development on ARM and virtualization - I suggest you look at
> Linux vserver. I have it pretty much working, but there are a couple of
> bugs in the tools stemming from the fact that dietlibc isn't quite bug
> free on ARM yet, but it's getting close (see this bug:
>
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=667852 )
Well, my laptop runs libvirt and I m quite happy with that. I'll stick
with libvirt/qemu as that does not interfere with my 'production' VMs.
Maybe you understood my question wrong... Gol i to do some
development/tests on my x86_64 laptop, and then run the resulting
packages on the hardware ARM.
I get it, but ARM emulated on x86 will run at a tiny fraction of native
speed. You may well find it completely unusable.
Gordan