Architectures/ARM

Fedora ARM

This is the starting page for the Fedora port to the ARM architecture.

Goals and Objectives

The primary goal of this project is to provide support for ARM as a secondary architecture in Fedora.

A secondary goal is to enable derivative distributions based on the Fedora package collection and repository that are more suitably optimized for embedded and mobile use-cases.

Technical Approach

Native Compilation

Fedora policy requires that packages be natively compiled. We use a cluster of ARM hardware and QEMU virtual machines to build the packages natively for ARM.

CPU and Architecture Target

The baseline ARM CPU architecture that we have chosen to support is ARMv5, Little Endian, Soft-Float, EABI. We believe that this provides a nice baseline and that the pre-built packages and root file system images. You should be able to use this on many of the modern ARM CPUs, including XScale, ARM926 and ARM-11, etc.

Although we do not provide such binaries, the sources also lend themselves for building for pre-ARMv5TE hardware. The same is true for big-endian CPUs.

Installer and Kernel

We currently do not plan to provide an installer, ISO images, or a kernel. Unlike in the x86 world, different ARM CPU families require different kernel images. Likewise, it is not entirely clear whether it makes sense to provide an installer or ISO images.

Getting Started with the Fedora ARM Port

The easiest way to get started is to download a prebuilt root filesystem built from F8 packages that includes yum. This is suitable to chroot into, and then installing additional packages as needed using yum. You can use QEMU as well. You should also be able to customize it for your environment easily (e.g., configure it for booting over NFS, or from a hard-drive, etc.).

• Using Fedora ARM with Qemu

If you are interested in an account on an ARM machine, contact LennertBuytenhek.

Fedora ARM Repository

The work to date is available from: [1] .

The following is available for F8:

• A set of patches necessary to make Fedora packages build for ARM. Our goal is to get all these patches merged into Fedora, as many of them as possible in the Fedora 9 development cycle.
• A set of source RPMs from the base F8 repository and from F8 updates repository that have been modified to build for ARM.
• A set of binary RPMs from the base F8 repository and the F8 updates repository .
• A prebuilt root filesystem to help you get started quickly.

We also provide:

• an ARM cross toolchain , built from Fedora sources.
• a utility called Rfsbuild for building ARM Root File Systems.

What work is left to be done?

• We have a TODO list here .

How to get in touch?

• The Fedora-ARM mailing list is available for both user and developer discussions.
• We also have an IRC channel #fedora-arm on Freenode.