Architectures/ARM/Meetings/FUDCon Lawrence 2013

Summary

Members of the Fedora ARM project are attending the 2013 FUDCon event in Lawrence, Kansas (Kansas University). We have sessions on Saturday and Sunday, with some informal events besides. Please see below for further details.

We're meeting in room 2112 in Learned Hall.

Contact/Logistics

The following people can help you find the ARM team in Kansas, or help with ARM-related concerns:

• Jon Masters (IRC: jonmasters, cell: +1-617-759-1337).
• Brendan Conoboy (IRC: bconoboy, cell: +1-714-326-9657).
• Chris Tyler (IRC: ctyler, cell: Canadian roaming, are you kidding?)

Agenda and Discussion Notes

The following is the running log of the agenda as agreed to on Saturday morning, as well as some of the items discussed.

Saturday AM:

F18 Final discussion

• Still working on Highbank support, problems with Secure Mode access
• Going to ship with 3.6 kernel for F18 ARM GA
• Going to ship 3.7 kernel as a zero-day update, but that will likely break Highbank support (at least for a few days?)
• Going to fix 3.7 Highbank support as an update ASAP
• config settings
• Problem packages
  • Eclipse -- takes a long time to build -- but a scratch build supposedly works, so it may be fixed [#863801]
  • ghc -- appears to be a problem with ghc-devel -- still needing more information on what's broken
  • js -- bad configure lines? (armv7 settings still showing up on the v5 build?) [$892382]
  • graphical updates (yumex? PackageKit?)
• Blocker bug tracker bugs have been created [Trackers]

Linaro LEG update

• Jon Masters has been working with Linaro for over a year
• Have wanted a enterprise server oriented working group within Linaro
• This is LEG
• Engineer assignees working within LEG to solve problems and push things upstream, work on standardization
• There is a roadmap on linaro.org + minutes from the LEG meetings
• Al Stone from Red Hat working on ACPI support
• Fu Wei from Red Hat working on getting the Linaro test system up and running on Fedora
• ARM is also working other standards, etc.
• Jon to write a message to the mailing list with more details on LEG, engineer assignees from the various companies, etc.
• Linaro are working with us -- not against us. Let's work together and bridge the two communities. They're not going to do any mass rebuild of Fedora -- they'll probably have spins and/or perhaps a remix for testing.
• Hopefully we can get more Fedora folks at Linaro Connect conferences
• List of high-level Linaro projects at [Linaro Cards]

Future

• PHX2 move
  • /mnt/koji rsync'd from Seneca to Phoenix as of yesterday
  • Dennis will try to keep it as current as possible to make it easy to make the switch
  • Cutover process will be: kickstart the builders, bring up four or five to start (soft + hard), switch off apache in Seneca, dump the database, load the database, bring everything up in Phoenix, change DNS over, and then make sure everything is OK, then build up the builder capacity.
• PA planning
  • Push for Primary -- branching sometime in the next four to six weeks -- some of the builders will be dedicated for primary arch, some will be dedicated to secondary (because we need to support it for another 13 months past F19 GA).
  • Hardware shipping on Monday the 21st
  • Hardware will be installed in the Phoenix data center over the next couple of weeks
• v5/v6/v7 support
  • Move v5 and v7 to Phoenix
  • Build v5 for F19 and then stop producing v5 releases (unless we get consensus that 18 is a good place to stop, but that might be a bit abrupt)
  • Seneca is going to manage the process of building v6 for the Raspberry Pi support, and maintain it for at least 18 months of support on the Pi
  • v7 will go Primary (hopefully for F20), but v5 and v6 won't go to primary arch
• v8 plans
  • Generally speaking, you won't see tangible hardware in the very near future
  • From the software side, most of the support for v8 should be in F19 (as a secondary arch)
  • In the F20 and F21 cycles, we'll look at when to push v8 to primary arch (shooting for the F22 cycle -- but this is highly contingent upon hardware availability)
• Smoothing the on-ramp process + growing contributor base
  • Getting a "secret decoder ring" to help you understand the ARM jargon, versions, sfp vs. hfp, etc.
  • New contributor documentation
    • What are the different types of hardware?
    • What is uboot?
    • How do I get an image, what one should I use?
    • Software vs Hardware floating point?
    • What can I do with this arm board?
    • How can I help?
  • Getting around the Fedora tools as a developer (koji, koji-shadow, where to fix bugs, etc.)
  • Low hanging fruit / janitor list -- items that newcomers can work on
  • Paul W. is responsible for helping to flesh this out

Saturday PM + Sunday

Friday

NOTE: Dinner is at Tellers at 8pm. We are heading out from the conference hotel (ride sharing) at 7:30pm (please contact Jon Masters by text on 617-759-1337 if you need picking up from somewhere else). If you have not RSVPed please contact Jon to let him know you are planning to attend.

• ARM to Primary (Brendan Conoboy, ARM team)
• ARM Building Exercises (Mark Langsdorf)

Saturday

• Jared Smith brought an OpenBlocks AX3 ARM server (based on the Armada XP processor) that is currently running Debian, and he'd like some help getting Fedora on it -- both to show the OpenBlocks folks how we got it working, as well as to help Jared learn more about getting Fedora running on a new piece of ARM hardware.