
Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture - protomyth
http://lwn.net/Articles/487622/
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sounds
What would convince me to use Fedora ARM?

An ARM Laptop with specs approximately on par with a Macbook Pro.

Don't fall for the "race to the bottom" and produce an ARM Netbook w/9-inch
screen. That's been done already.

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crumblan
I would love to have an ARM netbook that lasts for a couple of days on a full
charge. Actually I'd like one with an e-ink screen. Maybe 13 inches?

~~~
miratrix
CPU is rather a small power of total platform power consumption these days.
Switching x86 to ARM won't magically get you from 5 to 50 hours of active
usage. If you compare MacBook Air and the new iPad, you'll see that the
difference is actually rather small:

MacBook Air 11.6 - 35 WHr battery and 5 hours of Wifi Usage at 7 W [1] New
iPad - 42.5 WHr battery and 10 hours of Wifi Usage at 4.25 W [2]

e-ink screen may make that last far longer... but if you've spent any time
trying to use the e-ink Kindle browser, you'll quickly realize that the lack
of fast refresh rate is a very difficult problem to solve in terms of usable
UI.

[1] <http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html> [2]
<http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/>

~~~
crumblan
As it is a netbook, I assume that the user puts much less demand on a GPU than
he would on an Apple device. I was also thinking of using it on the road -- so
no wifi.

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moonboots
"Primary architecture" in this context just means first class architecture.
Both x86 and x86-64 are already primary architectures in Fedora while ARM is
currently a secondary architecture.

~~~
wtracy
Are those the only two architectures that Fedora currently considers
"primary"?

~~~
moonboots
Yes

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adestefan
This would make the Raspberry Pi distribution a "first class citizen" for
Fedora.

~~~
freehunter
Without really absorbing the entire article (it got confusing to me at first
glance as to which quote was from a Fedora official representative and which
wasn't), I wonder if this is the reason why. Since I believe Fedora is the
only officially distributed OS for the RPi, I can imagine Fedora wanting to
jump on that chance. There may have been some kind of pressure (even just the
request) from the RPi Foundation to make this change.

It makes sense. ARM has a bright future. The difficulty lies in drivers for
all the various SoC architectures. I'm not sure how Debian handles that, not
having used Debian on ARM.

~~~
adestefan
Having used Debian on an ARM development board, the issue is handled by "you
supply the kernel, we'll supply the rest." On most ARM systems there's a
robust firmware that allows you to load a kernel from just about anywhere.

For my system, I used multistrap to create a very basic Debian installation. I
then TFTP over a kernel and boot using the minimal installation as an NFS
rootfs. Once, I got everything to a decent state, all I had to do was copy
over the rootfs to a local ubifs flash filesystem and tweak the boot params to
boot from the new ubifs root.

