ARM
Broaden the target market to include ARM based systems. With ARM based servers coming round the corner, ARM v8 64-bit and ARM devices scattered in every corner of technology, it would make sense to distribute a version of RHEL capable of running on the ARM chipset.
Other distros have much better ports/integration.
Red Hat (through Fedora) should take the lead in this area and bind the distribution Gold releases to the ARM platform as well as i386/x86_64.
Yes - there are things that ARM can't do as well as Intel/AMD CPU's, but there are also things that it does better.
Although I'm thinking about creating large farms of cheap, low-energy app servers here, it's not beyond the realm of possibility to see this as a good virtualisation platform either. Especially with HP's Project Moonshot on the go.
Thanks
Duncan
Responses
Red Hat
Guru
1638 points
Hi Duncan,
I've not got the inside line on ARM in RHEL, but there is a strong effort already going in Fedora to port to the architecture.
Some links that may be of interest:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/254
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
A lot of work appears to be going in to the bootstrap right now:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Fedora15_HardFP_Bootstrap
Best regards,
Mark
In addition to above, linux community is working with arm developers for standardised h/w .
reference:
https://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/171-jonathan-corbet/445344-whats-up-with-arm%22
http://lwn.net/Articles/443531/
http://lwn.net/Articles/463506/
Guru
2135 points
Whilst I know about the Fedora ARM porting work, it just doesn't seem to have a high enough profile to succeed yet. From what I remember, Debian have included ARM as part of the standard build, meaning that packages must compile on ARM to pass tests (I may not be entirely accurate on that).
This seems to be the kind of attitude that Red Hat & Fedora need to adopt, otherwise the porting work will end up several versions behind the current wave. Ubuntu and Debian can run on ARM devices now. Red Hat will end up missing the boat on systems like HP Moonshot ARM servers.
Guru
2135 points
A year down the line and there doesn't seem to be any progress on the ARM front.
Fedora 17 still struggles.
Fedora 18 don't ask.
I see there's some Fedora work starting on the ARMv8 64-bit side: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/AArch64
But things seem painfully slow. Especially when ARM devices outnumber x86_64 devices in my home.
D
The ARM devices currently in your home are in all likeliness not of a type that's interesting from an Enterprise Linux perspective. AArch64 is a lot more interesting from that perspective. It is getting backing from Enterprise-class server vendors like Dell and is likely to present a much more unified machine model to target than the existing ARM menagerie. Mark already pointed to that, and I'd like to add a link to LWN's coverage of this topic, Supporting 64-bit ARM systems.
Some other developments probably worth mentioning here are Red Hat Devs Working On ARM64 OpenJDK Port and Red Hat's Linaro membership.
Speaking of ARM developments, we now have an opening for a Principal Software Engineer - Virtualization with "Enhance the performance and scalability of KVM on X86 and ARM " as one of their principal duties.
As of today, there's an upstream kernel release (3.7) which includes AArch64 support.
[linux-kernel-git]$ git diff v3.6..v3.7 arch/arm64 | diffstat | tail -n 1 161 files changed, 20831 insertions(+)
And as of today, there's an upstream glibc release (2.17) which includes AArch64 support.
Red Hat
Guru
1638 points
Hi Duncan,
some of the challenges to producing one kernel that will run across common ARM machines are alluded to in this interview, in particular, the need for a common motherboard standard to enable device detection:
http://www.serverwatch.com/server-trends/red-hat-linux-on-arm-is-no-joke.html
There was also a talk by Jon Masters at the Summit that again covers ARM:
http://gb.redhat.com/resourcelibrary/videos/hyperscale-cloud-computing-with-arm-processors
I'm sorry we haven't got anything more concrete to say publically at this moment, but the work is going on.
Mark
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