Fedora 21 and ARM aarch64 status for alpha

With the Fedora 21 Alpha freeze looming in the rear view mirror, although the object wasn’t as close as it would appear, I thought it was high time that I gave a brief overview of the state of ARM aarch64 in Fedora. Some might assume the silence means not a lot has been happening but this is extremely far from the truth!

So lets start with a few statistics:

  • Builds the same with mainline: 14973 odd (yes, that’s nearly 15,000 Fedora source packages built on aarch64!)
  • Older builds: 217 (we have a built but it’s not the same NVR as mainline)
  • Missing builds: 352

So that’s looking pretty damn good! The main components that we’re missing that make up the missing builds comprise of two main groups.

The first is builds that are FTBFS on mainline and that’s basically, if it can’t be build on F-21 on mainline we have no chance of rebuilding the f21 tag.

The second reason is platforms that aren’t yet supported on the aarch64 architecture. The core group of these come down to mono (and anything that depends on mono), golang, v8 (mongodb/nodejs etc), pypy make up the majority of that list. We’re working with upstreams to hopefully fill those gaps before long.

There’s a few other minor stragglers that don’t really fit into either of the above. erlang just needs to be bootstrapped plus a few others like thunderbird, libreoffice and hadoop that need some attention which we’ll get to soon.

So the aarch64 userspace, while still not 100% there, is looking EXTREMELY good and there’s a number of people that are now putting it through it’s paces on a daily basis which in turn allows us to improve it as we go.

Hardware
As I indicated in my 3.16 kernel status we now have support for a number of hardware options to run the userspace. Some of them are emulated (qemu, ARM foundation model) and some actual physical (APM Mustang, AMD Seattle) if you’re lucky enough to have access. The support for these devices is improving all the time and support for kernel features are coming along pretty thick and fast.

So in summary the Fedora aarch64 is in very good shape for the Fedora 21 Alpha and will only improve as we apply polish along side x86 and ARMv7 in the lead up to Fedora 21 GA.

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