Alternative option for solving Fedora i686 vs geode problems

[Peter Robinson]

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)
>
> 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?

Two comments.

1) I thought we'd moved away from rolling our own distro due to the
amount of time and engineering resources it required that OLPC no
longer had. Has this changed? IE is there an internal thing that has
changed that hasn't been announced externally?

2) FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) is dealing with the
issue upstream [1][2] in Fedora with the view of getting it fixed
upstream for F-14 or at the very least clarified. It was agreed in
F-12 that the Geode LX would be supported and that decision wasn't
discussed otherwise. Please add to the conversation on the ticket or
the list. It might be worth seeing the outcome of this before we go
and reinvent the wheel again.

Peter

[1] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-June/137070.html
(but thread goes back to April)
[2] https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/387