Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-arm (74 mails)

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[opensuse-arm] Outcome of the round table meeting
We had a round table meeting this morning in the SUSE offices in
Nuremberg. The intention of the meeting was to try and get some form
of milestones agreed, and work out our next moves and find out what
tasks etc need to be done.  Several decisions were made:

1.) ARMv7 is the focus. This isn't necessarily news, but we just
wanted to reiterate the message. Also the ARMv5 builds are going to
have their priorities in the OBS lowered to minimise the build power
consumption. We're not deleting them,  just not focusing on them; if
someone *really* wants v5 builds then best you roll your sleeves up
and get stuck  in, we will provide support, guidance and

2.) We are aiming for 12.2 to have full ARM support. So this means we
need to freeze in time for 12.2 RC1, so we can not have any build
failures. If there are we need to fix them, but some applications are
known not to run on ARM, where these are identified we will just use
"ExcludeArch: %arm". This needs to be done by 01June2012 at the

3.) To ensure we can make the deadline we need to make sure that all
sources are submitted into Factory via the respective devel projects.
This means that we have no source overlays in the openSUSE:Factory:ARM
repo. Also that all hacks and "fixes" are discussed with maintainers
and either incorporated or better fixes are submitted. We will *NOT*
have separate sources or patches for the ARM port, everything will
have to be in Factory.

4.) We need to have a reference platform that *ALL* developers can use
to verify 12.2 will work, this will be the Pandaboard. This does not
mean we will not be supporting other devices, like Snowball,
Beagleboard or Origen; they will be available but they may not have
gone through the same rigorous tests. We will also look at having XFCE
as the reference platform Desktop Environment. Now before anyone
starts calling for blood, there were some reasons for refernece
platform decision:

a.) There are sufficient numbers of Pandaboards for developers to use
b.) Pandaboard has the best upstream support out of all the devices
c.) We already have Kiwi based images for it
d.) XFCE is the only DE that builds almost completely and runs at the
e.) 2D graphics work out of the box on the Pandaboard

5.) openSUSE's ARM port has gone on a diet. The Geeko is now FATless,
this means we no longer have a separate FAT partition for the boot
file system. All partitions are now ext3 by default, BTRFS is
supported but isn't our default.

6.) The Kiwi generated images will use the OEM format rather than the
Live Install format. Basically this means that a user will "dd" the
image to the target SD card and then the "second boot" process will
kick in when a user boots from the card so that they can configure
passwords/network/etc and it will repartition to take up the whole of
the card.

7.) Bernhard is going to look at integrating ARM support into
OpenQA[0]. This means we can get advance notice of breakages etc.
prior to releasing images.

8.) We will be triggering a rebuild of the ARM repo to ensure that
builds take into account some of the big changes that have happened in
Factory (like the Xorg changes), and also to clean out any "fixes"
that were applied to the repo. This will most likely be initiated in
batches rather than the complete repo, hopefully we can avoid the repo
being out of commission for four weeks this way.

Another outcome of the meeting was working out some tasks that needed
to be completed. There aren't that many tasks and they are open to
*EVERYONE* to help out with:
I.) We need to keep a closer eye on the package failures. Using Dirk's
Build Comparison page[1] will help to isolate failures due to qemu.
All qemu bugs/issues need to be passed on to either Alexander Graf
(agraf) or Andreas Farber (afarber) for fixing.

II.) We need to look at YaST's second stage module and see if that
will be of use to the ARM port.

III.) We really need to re-work the wiki for the ARM port. It needs to
be much more detailed as it hasn't been updated in a while.

So that gives us three months or 12 weeks to get our house in order.



0 = http://openqa.opensuse.org/
1 = http://www.suse.de/~dmueller/arm-buildservice/
Andrew Wafaa
IRC: FunkyPenguin
GPG: 0x3A36312F
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