Alternative option for solving Fedora i686 vs geode problems

[Tiago Marques]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:19 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:

> 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)
>
>
Even slower?
AFAIK there were some sugestions from the GCC team - I think - that the
Geode runs faster with the i486 compilation and not i586. I never put that
claim to test though.


> 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
>
>
Perhaps a quick test with compiler options before deciding on any. I can
help with this.


> 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?
>

If you're planning on doing a repository exclusively for the XO-1, Gentoo is
simple to setup and, from what I read on this mailing list, thicks all your
boxes:

   - You can upgrade GCC and glibc when you want to(or don't)
   - Compile properly compiler optimized packages
   - Keep network-manager up to date, upgrade it whenever you want (CentOS
   doesn't, right?)
   - Update involves issuing a bunch of emerge commands for your binary
   packages hosted on the repository, compile once like with Fedora.
   - "glsa-check -tv all" shows you what you need to fix security wise, when
   you're in maintenance mode.
   - Portage can be put on a squashfs filesystem and take just ~50MB of disk
   instead of 700+(I've done this on my XO)
   - There's already a* sugar overlay available* with ebuilds
   - Get a lower memory footprint from building packages using just the
   necessary features through USE flags

I have this setup at home and can also give you a hand with this.

Best regards,
Tiago


> Daniel
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