So with Fedora 22 well and truly out for both ARMv7 and aarch64 lets have a look at the release in general and also at the 4.0 kernel it ships.
Firstly I’d like to shout out to the AMAZING job done by the web team on the new sites for Spins, ARM and Labs. They really do look awesome!
It’s all to easy to get bogged down in the actual technical components that make up the actual release and not forget that there’s work that goes on all over the place that contributes to making the release easy to use even before you begin the download.
Anyway! On to ARMv7. We shipped GA with the 4.0.4 kernel and u-boot 2015.01. This combination gives us improved support for numerous devices primarily through new DT support and improvements to drivers. The 4.0 kernel from an ARM HW support PoV really was a minor revision. With the fully packaged and updated fedora-arm-installer it’s even easier to get a device up and running.
We were hoping to get enough time to rebase this to 2015.04 but we just plain ran out of time, although we do have a plan to be able to update the u-boot when writing an image to card/stick without the need to regenerate the images. More details on the improvements we’re planning for fedora-arm-installer for another post!
From an aarch64 point of view the big change, although one an average user won’t notice, was we went from carrying a rather large (around 65K lines) enablement patch for the kernel to a small collection of 4 bug/problem specific patches! This is a massive change where in the F-21 cycle we had a gigantic architecture enablement patch! This makes it much more straight forward and less stressful for both myself as the architecture maintainer and the core Fedora kernel developers. In terms of the rest of aarch64 we still support VExpress, APM Storm platform primarily with the Mustang boards, and the AMD Seattle platform.
Overall the Fedora 22 release on the ARM platforms is a really nice release, there’s been some good changes there to enable easier and quicker updates in the future and easier means of adding decent support to new devices mid cycle. AArch64 is maturing and hopefully we’ll start to see some more platforms land and the architecture start to depart the niche status!