Caolan McNamara writes:

On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 00:33 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:

...

Hi all,

We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial) Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.

The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float, little endian. The majority of the important and frequently used Fedora packages have been built for ARM.

FWIW, I ported OOo to arm-eabi last year, the "vanilla" rpms of the time are at... http://ooo.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/cws/upload/armeabiport... and that work is now integrated into 2.4.0 as in rawhide so in theory for F9 it should build out of the box.

At the time there was no ecj/libgcj port to arm-eabi so the extra flag to OOo's configure required to workaround that was --without-java, I see java-1.5.0-gcj-devel in the repo now so that's presumably unnecessary now.

I certainly hope so. Lennert and I have done a lot of work to get gcj working on ARM EABI, so if anything fails I'd appreciate a heads-up. Yeah, I know it's rather slow. :-)

Andrew.

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 15:46 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:

Cool! Is there any place that documents the changes necessary for 2.3 so that we can also provide a (separate) set of 2.3 rpms for F8?

Should in theory just be

http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armoabiport01.patch + http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armeabi01.patch

Though if OOo fails to register components or start up then you might need to make additional changes to some makefile.mks that reference "VERSIONMAP" to reuse the i386 map files for arm, all of which was fixed up for 2.4. I don't remember if its strictly necessary to fix that in 2.3 or not.

C.

Rabeeh Khoury wrote:

...

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 15:46 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:

...

Cool! Is there any place that documents the changes necessary for 2.3 so that we can also provide a (separate) set of 2.3 rpms for F8?

Should in theory just be

http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armoabiport01.patch

http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/patches/workspace.armeabi01.patch

Though if OOo fails to register components or start up then you might need to make additional changes to some makefile.mks that reference "VERSIONMAP" to reuse the i386 map files for arm, all of which was fixed up for 2.4. I don't remember if its strictly necessary to fix that in 2.3 or not.

[RKh] I'v just tried installing the RPM packages; at the beginning it didn't work well until I noticed that the binaries generates lots of unaligned accesses. ARM kernel I'm using doesn't fix that for the user-space by default; so after 'echo 3 > /proc/cpu/alignment' and running soffice and importing a Microsoft word doc I got the following amount of exceptions -

-bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment User: 125929 System: 0 Skipped: 0 Half: 27982 Word: 21780 DWord: 74940 Multi: 0 User faults: 3 (fixup+warn)

Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? Any idea if this can be fixed too?

Interesting. I guess we'd want to fix this: unaligned access is so slow. I'd break out a debugger and have a look. Or at least I would if debuginfo weren't broke. :-(

Andrew.

On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 05:12:42PM +0000, Andrew Haley wrote:

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-bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment User: 125929 System: 0 Skipped: 0 Half: 27982 Word: 21780 DWord: 74940 Multi: 0 User faults: 3 (fixup+warn)

Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? Any idea if this can be fixed too?

Interesting. I guess we'd want to fix this: unaligned access is so slow. I'd break out a debugger and have a look. Or at least I would if debuginfo weren't broke. :-(

Still on my TODO list. :-(

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 19:01 +0200, Rabeeh Khoury wrote:

[RKh] I'v just tried installing the RPM packages; at the beginning it didn't work well until I noticed that the binaries generates lots of unaligned accesses. ARM kernel I'm using doesn't fix that for the user-space by default; so after 'echo 3 > /proc/cpu/alignment' and running soffice and importing a Microsoft word doc I got the following amount of exceptions -

-bash-3.2# cat /proc/cpu/alignment User: 125929 System: 0 Skipped: 0 Half: 27982 Word: 21780 DWord: 74940 Multi: 0 User faults: 3 (fixup+warn)

Any idea where those unaligned accesses are coming from? Any idea if this can be fixed too?

I'm sure its fixable and probably fairly simple, its just unfortunate that qemu doesn't emulate that part of things so I can't see them myself.

C.

On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 14:12 +0200, Rabeeh Khoury wrote:

I applied your two patches to the build but I'm failing on 'regcomp.bin' both in %build and %install where it's eating all the memory and at the end being killed for out of memory. Did you have the same behavior?

No, but I built it "vanilla" style, not with rpmbuild and the .spec. But do you have a build log for which regcomp is failing ?

Can you please provide some lines what 'regcomp' does in the build and how to start debugging this?

regcomp stands for register component so it should basically dlopen a library (in the case of a C++ component, different but similar idea for java/python components) and call a few of the component registration c symbols and then write the name of the component and the returned details of what the component implements into a .rdb file. Without knowing what component when registered eats the memory I couldn't guess if its a C++ one, a python one or a java one which causes the trouble.

There are some things in solenv/bin/modules/installer/globals.pm where there are

$unomaxservices = ...; $javamaxservices = ...;

if you set those to e.g. 1 then during installation at least then there should only be one library at a time passed to the registration process, that might help isolate if it affects just one lib or *all* libs. But if there was an OOM during the build then it won't affect that. Probably best to start at the first problem. Where did it fail during build ? and was OOo configured with or without java on arm ?

C.

On Jan 17, 2008 2:40 PM, Lennert Buytenhek buytenh@wantstofly.org wrote:

On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 09:23:10AM +0100, Oliver Falk wrote:

...

...

We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial) Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.

The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float, little endian. The majority of the important and frequently used Fedora packages have been built for ARM.

The Fedora/ARM architecture wiki page has more info: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM

The easiest way to start using Fedora 8/ARM is to download the prebuilt root filesystem, which can be booted in QEMU, or chroot'ed into or booted from on any ARMv5 or later processor running in little endian mode. Additional packages can be installed by using yum, which is provided in the filesystem.

A HOWTO which describes getting Fedora/ARM running in QEMU is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu

There currently are a handful of known issues, which are described at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO

Please help us by using the Fedora/ARM port and reporting any issues you run into so that we can fix them.

I should have bought something else/bigger than my WRT54, I guess :-)

Isn't the WRT54 MIPS based with 4M of RAM or so? :)

Yes I think so. They're Broadcom chips which I'm pretty sure uses a MIPS32 core.

But on the other hand my Dlink DNS-323 is a 500Hmz Marvell ARM chip. A storage Fedora sub distro would be cool.

Peter

On Jan 17, 2008 6:48 AM, Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:

On Jan 17, 2008 2:40 PM, Lennert Buytenhek buytenh@wantstofly.org wrote:

...

On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 09:23:10AM +0100, Oliver Falk wrote:

...

...

We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial) Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.

The package repository has been built for ARMv5 EABI, soft-float, little endian. The majority of the important and frequently used Fedora packages have been built for ARM.

The Fedora/ARM architecture wiki page has more info: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM

The easiest way to start using Fedora 8/ARM is to download the prebuilt root filesystem, which can be booted in QEMU, or chroot'ed into or booted from on any ARMv5 or later processor running in little endian mode. Additional packages can be installed by using yum, which is provided in the filesystem.

A HOWTO which describes getting Fedora/ARM running in QEMU is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/HowToQemu

There currently are a handful of known issues, which are described at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/TODO

Please help us by using the Fedora/ARM port and reporting any issues you run into so that we can fix them.

I should have bought something else/bigger than my WRT54, I guess :-)

Isn't the WRT54 MIPS based with 4M of RAM or so? :)

Yes I think so. They're Broadcom chips which I'm pretty sure uses a MIPS32 core.

But on the other hand my Dlink DNS-323 is a 500Hmz Marvell ARM chip. A storage Fedora sub distro would be cool.

Creating a storage sub-distro would be relatively easy if you restrict to just taking a subset of packages, and not worry about breaking dependencies (or using other tricks to bring footprint at a reasonable level).

You could create it yourself by using the pre-built root file system on QEMU and the adding/removing packages as appropriate.

Of course, one would also need kernel packages for each of the devices like DNS-323.

Regards, Manas

ps:

If you are more interested in a small footprint, embedded distro based on Fedora for NAS (and other kind of devices such as wireless AP's, home gateways, and such), then that is more work. We have done work in that area, and would like to release it to the community soon. But, keep in mind that, at that point, it can not be called Fedora. If anyone is interested in that effort, then let us know, as that will motivate us to get stuff out sooner rather than later.

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 12:36:33AM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:

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We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial) Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.

This is a great day for Fedora, thank you Lennert!

Thanks. :)

Hm, my package libnjb does not build, no good. :-(

It is built?

f8-updates-arm/libnjb-2.2.6-2.fc8.armv5tel.rpm f8-updates-arm/libnjb-debuginfo-2.2.6-2.fc8.armv5tel.rpm f8-updates-arm/libnjb-devel-2.2.6-2.fc8.armv5tel.rpm f8-updates-arm/libnjb-examples-2.2.6-2.fc8.armv5tel.rpm

A consequence of not being hooked up in the main Fedora build system is that we don't do builds in the same order as they are done on i386/x86_64/ppc/ppc64. By the time libnjb was queued for building, an F8 update had already been issued for it, and the way we've set things up means that the F8 base package won't be built anymore if a newer version of the package (i.e. the update) has already been built.

On Jan 17, 2008 4:13 PM, Michel Salim michel.sylvan@gmail.com wrote:

On Jan 14, 2008 6:33 PM, Lennert Buytenhek buytenh@wantstofly.org wrote:

...

Hi all,

We are proud to announce the availability of a(n unofficial) Fedora 8 package repository for the ARM architecture.

Great news! Would it be possible to install this on Scratchbox? Maemo's SDK is already using it.

Are you, perhaps, thinking of QEMU? Scratchbox is a tool to build packages. We dont use it for Fedora/ARM as we build the packages natively.

QEMU has an ARM emulator, and you can install and run Fedora/ARM on it.

Regards, Manas