Fedora-18 ARM release: support for OLPC hardware?

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 10:11 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Jan 21 2013, John Gilmore wrote:
>> I'm way outside the OLPC & Fedora development processes nowadays, which
>> is why I'm asking what may be a dumb question.
>>
>> The Fedora 18 release is finally out for x86 and x64.  There's a beta
>> for ARM that supports half a dozen ARM systems.  Oddly, in my mind,
>> OLPC is not one of them.  It's odd because there are probably more
>> OLPC systems running Fedora than any other ARM hardware.  In F17, the
>> ARM release went to "GA - General Availability" for those half dozen
>> ARM boards, again not for OLPC hardware.
>
> Two reasons I can think of:
>
> * We (OLPC hackers) have taken on the burden of creating these builds.
>   Our 12.1.0 ARM release is based on Fedora 17, and our 13.1.0 ARM
>   release is based on Fedora 18.  We use the Fedora packages directly,
>   other than for packages that we've forked or added.
>
> * The systems supported by Fedora all have upstream kernel support, but
>   OLPC's ARM systems do not yet have upstream kernel support.  (There's
>   no particular barrier; we just haven't had time to push it ourselves.)

The user space is completely compatible.

The reason we don't support the XOs out of the box is mostly kernel
based. The two main reasons are:
- non complete upstream support. Marvell is supporting all their ARM
SoCs via the mvebu platform support with components making it upstream
beginning in 3.7 but it's not all there yet. I'm not sure whether OLPC
plans on supporting the ARM XO platforms through that or some other
way.
- Lack of support for standard Fedora kernel update process via grubby
for OFW. This is a problem on both x86 and ARM XOs. This is tracked
via RHBZ  497398
- Lack of support for an open X driver. Although there is now a
project for reverse engineering the Vivante (sp?) driver I have no
idea what the state of it is and whether it works with the XO HW.

Peter