Fedora20 will list ARM as the main Architecture

A routine meeting of the Fedora Engineering Committee announced that ARM will rank it as the primary architecture in Fedora20, with the same status as i686 and x86_64. A detailed introduction is provided to address the IT industry's green, environmentally friendly, and energy-saving needs. large quantities of cheap ARM computing devices are also becoming increasingly popular. Traditionally, ARM occupies a dominant position in embedded devices and mobile devices. In recent years, ARM's performance has improved, and it has also moved into the field of traditional computing devices, such as desktop computers and servers. Therefore, Fedora plans

A routine meeting of the Fedora Engineering Committee announced that ARM would rank Fedora 20 as the primary architecture, with the same status as i686 and x86_64. Details

In response to the IT industry's green and energy-saving demands, large quantities of cheap ARM computing devices are also becoming increasingly popular. Traditionally, ARM occupies a dominant position in embedded devices and mobile devices. In recent years, ARM's performance has improved, and it has also moved into the field of traditional computing devices, such as desktop computers and servers. Therefore, Fedora plans to push the armv7l architecture as the primary architecture to the Fedora Koji center compilation and packaging server. Currently, Fedora has 96 four-core Calxeda EnergyCore computing nodes in the data center in Phoenix, United States. Some of them are still used to compile and package the subsequent updates of Fedora 18 and Fedora 19, and wait until the lifecycle of Fedora 18 ends, computing nodes used for ARMv5 soft floating point compilation and packaging will be reassigned for other tasks. The infrastructure team in charge of Fedora is very interested in ARM's load capability testing. These computing nodes may be allocated for quality assurance and other engineering projects. Currently, Fedora plans to allocate 24 computing nodes for the Koji server in the top architecture of Fedora 20.

When the Fedora product manager published the news that ARM was the top architecture of Fedora 20, heated discussions began. After all, this was the most significant technological change of Fedora in recent years. Some people think that the support of Fedora to ARM is only in line with the trend; some people think that ARM performance is too slow, and it takes ten times or eight times to compile the huge components such as Kernel and Eclipse; some people think that the current ARM transplant version is not complete very well, or even lower than the PowerPC that removes the primary architecture in Fedora 13, and Packager is not obligated to do more debugging for ARM, however, ARM was eventually incorporated into the top architecture of Fedora 20. Detailed discussion

In the old age of the secondary architecture of Fedora ARM, armv5tel soft floating point and armv7hfp hardware floating point coexist. armv5tel has been abandoned at Fedora 19, and Fedora 18 will be the last version that supports armv5tel. After Fedora 20 is upgraded to the primary architecture, armv7hfp will be named armhfp. This architecture requires the ARMv7 chip and must contain the VFP hardware floating point unit, however, the neon simd instruction set is not mandatory. Similarly, the armhfp architecture supports the LPAE physical address extension technology, and the 32-bit ARMv7 architecture supports more than 4 GB memory. The Fedora Project will continue to communicate and cooperate with the Linaro project to accelerate the migration of the 64-bit ARMv8 aarch64 architecture to meet the needs of the 64-bit ARM chip in the future. (It is said that the Linux kernel and the entire tool chain will be transplanted to the ARMv8 Architecture chip by waiting for the giant of the Linaro project .)

However, it is still difficult to list ARM as the primary architecture in the Fedora 20 development cycle. Whether it is the final release feature of Fedora 20 depends on the progress of ARM architecture transplantation. According to the release announcement of Fedora 19 for ARM, Fedora 20 for ARM may publish installation images based on the following four devices: CompuLab TrimSlice (Tegra 2), Texas Instruments PandaBoard (OMAP 4), Versatile Express (QEMU) and Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 (HighBank ). The ARMv6 architecture used by Raspberry Pi is not in the list of supported devices, but there will be unofficial Remix versions that use ARMv6 VFP hardware floating point.

Note: Each Calxeda EnergyCore computing node has a frequency of 1 GHz to 1 GHz ~ 1.4 GHz quad core Cortex-A9 core processor. The processor consumes to power ~ A memory size of 5 W, including 4 MB second-level cache and neon simd Unit, provides PCI Express 2.0x8 and SATA 2.0 interfaces, and supports 4 GB miniDIMM ECC DDR3L memory. In addition, EnergeCore has a 10 Gbps Optical Fiber Interface for multi-node clusters. At the press time, the official Calxeda website seemed to be faulty. The materials were sourced from the evaluation of Calxeda EnergeCore of Anandtech and Phoronix.

In addition to ARM's primary architecture, Fedora 20 currently recognizes the following features:

• Boost 1.54
• Hadoop
• KDE 4.11
• SDDM as the default KDE Display Manager
• Yesod Web Framework
• Shared certificate Tool
• Use libvirt to manage and run ARM virtual machines on x86
• Virtual Machine snapshot page of virt-manager

Feature details

 

Supplement: The following data table compares the time required for compiling on different architectures. The data comes from the ora Koji center compilation server, compiling the famous integrated development environment Eclipse on the ARM architecture takes about 15 hours longer than on x86. Data Table

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