aarch64 (arm64) on Fedora 21 update

I realise that there’s not been an update as to the state of ARM aarch64 on Fedora for sometime. We should really shout out our achievements a lot more as over the last few months or so there’s been fairly extreme progress made but we all just tend to apply the nose to the grindstone and get one with it!

So where are we? Well we’ve got the vast majoriity of Fedora built. As we’re only building for rawhide/F-21 there’s a number of missing F-21 builds but with the mass rebuild well and truly underway on mainline we’re all hyped up and building on aarch64 too (appart from a power outage in the Huntsville facility that hosts some of the builders!) and we’re hot on the tail of mainline builds.

So we have HW virtualisation support and a bunch of virt bits on top of that, the vast majority of other services and low level support like storage platforms, all the various desktops and most of the various development stacks (even Ada!). It’s actually looking pretty good. In recent time we’ve added R, ghc and a raft of different language support. The java team have done a really good job getting java-1.8.0-openjdk up to spec too!

So appart for the mainline builds that haven’t yet been built for F-21 what are we missing? Well not much really now. Go and nodejs, the later due to missing v8 js engine support (it’s upstream in a newer v8 release but Fedora is stil trailing), and the things that depend on them are the main ones now missing so no Docker as yet either. There’s no mono, and while the core erlang is built I need to work out the correct order to finishing the bootstrap.

The rest of the job now becomes somewhat boring in that once the mass rebuild is complete we just need to go through packages and fix individual packages that are FTBFS and I strongly suspect most of those will have issues on mainline too.

On the hardware and virtualisation front the current rawhide kernel should boot just fine on the ARM foundation model emulator and the next release of qemu will have full system emulation of aarch64 to enable the running of aarch64 on x86_64 similar to what we can do with ARMv7 now. The 3.16 kernel should allow us to run on the currently and soon to be available HW without too many problems either as the last core bits of support should land upstream in the current merge window.

In short aarch64 on Fedora is looking awesome! By the time Fedora 21 Alpha lands in two months time we’ll basically be feature complete, and even now it’s extremely usable for those lucky enough to have hardware or patient enough to use software emulators.