Alternative option for solving Fedora i686 vs geode problems

[Daniel Drake]

In another thread, we've been discussing the issue that Fedora 12
changed base architecture from i586 to i686. The XO-1 processor (Geode
LX) is a i586. Fedora 12 seems to run OK (although I suspect there
will be a few broken packages), but Fedora 13 is more obviously broken
(for a start, glibc doesn't work).

The approach we've been musing about is modifying the kernel to fill
in the gaps, where the Geode does not support a particular i686
instruction we can emulate it. (unfortunately this kernel-side project
is a bit slow moving, although we could find some resources to boost
it maybe)

I just thought of another option that we could consider looking at,
once we've finished off the F11-based release when we're ready to
think about moving forward.
Fedora's build tools are good and consistent, so we could simply
rebuild the parts of Fedora that we use.


1. Do a regular OS build (for i686)

The build system outputs a package list, e.g.
http://build.laptop.org/10.2.0/os122/os122.packages.txt

2. Download the SRPMs for each package in the list (using
"yumdownloader --source" for example)

3. Pass each SRPM to mock, using a modified config which sets
config_opts['target_arch'] to i586

4. Take all of mock's output, conveniently compiled for i586, putting
the RPMs in a repository

5. Do a build using the i586 repository


Comments/suggestions/refinements?

Daniel