[Server-devel] XS on ARM update.

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:13 PM, rihoward1 at gmail.com
<rihoward1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have been meaning to email you an update about XS on ARM for a while.
> I had to take a hiatus from what I was doing with it, but started back on it a while back.

Great that you're back on track. True, Fedora branches were
unpredictable, but the F17 push is solid. That's where it's at.

> Note that currently Puppet relies on some hard coded intel specific code.

Oh really? I'm assuming it'd be in the "facter" code, using lspci and
dmidecode to get the "facts" about hardware?

Short term it only needs to handle a missing lspci and dmidecode
without panicking -- XO hardware is pretty fixed for a given model
anyway -- long term, Puppet will want to datamine sysfs where
available. Not sure if it'll replace lspci in all cases, but on HW
that doesn't have a PCI bus, well... :-)

> I would like to chat with you some time about this as I want to discuss what is essential
> for the XS and which is the correct git branches etc to pull from for some olpc specific bits.

Let's flesh it out here. What are your doubts?

AFAIK, most things we have for the XS should work on latest F17 ARM,
some things will need a rebuild from SRPM. Exceptions:

 - There is a tricky situation with ejabberd which will need careful
handling. See the mailing list archive. For XS 0.7 we found the
problem late and IIRC the fix we applied there won't work for F17. So
some work is needed here.

 - xs-configuration handling of network-- note that this is _optional_.

 - All the services will be using old style init scripts. We need to
invest time in either testing that they work with systemd (compat
isn't perfect), or porting them to systemd (and testing that they work
too ;-) ).

cheers,


m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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