New clothes for Mageia: preview of ARM port is now available

We spoke about this some weeks ago, it’s now done! Thanks to Arnaud Patard (aka rtp) the Mageia ARM port is available for a first preview. The port’s code name is “arm eabi”, as a future port should be “arm eabihf”. It will use the hard float feature of Cortex family processors.

Where can I find it?

Because it’s a technical preview, for now, you will find it only on a specific mirror – thanks again to Arnaud.

ARM content

Again, because it’s a preview, not all Mageia packages are available for now. The preview has 1,382 SRPMS and 3,909 RPMS (excluding debug packages). The global ARM tree is about 9GB. More details:

• graphical environments: complete GNOME, minimal KDE
• desktop applications: Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice is on the way
• basic network services: httpd, named, LDAP, PostgreSQL, MySQL…
• development: Python, Perl, PHP, C, C++
• Mageia tools: installer, drakxtools, Mageia Control Center
• multimedia: audio support; video is not ready as it works for now by default on framebuffer

Proprietary video drivers are provided by manufacturers. For now the focus is not on free video drivers as they are not accelerated so it would not improve anything vs framebuffer drivers.

How was it built

ARM port started on a distribution bootstrap based on a Mandriva chroot. The build was  done using iurt: it took a bit longer but it helped a lot to fix some missing dependencies and various packaging problems. So the situation is now much cleaner.

More than a hundred packages were fixed because of compilation problems. They can now be rebuilt either for  i586 / x86_64 or arm. For now everything is available in SVN except some of them that still need to be committed.

What hardware is compatible?

This ARM port supports the Kirkwood series from Marvell. Most frequent are: Open-RD, computer plugs (SheevaPlug, GuruPlug). It runs also in qemu as a virtual machine.

Installing in qemu

You will find some short documentation explaining the main steps to make this work. You will find also a pre-built qemu image.

Still lots of things to be done!

This first release has been built using Mageia tools but not integrated into the Mageia build system yet. This is one of the main items on the current TODO list. A PandaBoard is waiting now to be installed in the Mageia build system so that a parallel build can be done in ARM when a package is submitted to the build system. The hard part will be managing different ARM machines using different socs meaning different kernels.

This too opens up a whole new range of possibilities for the Mageia platform: new hardware, new use cases, new applications.

You can get in touch with Mageia ARM developers on #mageia-dev on Freenode IRC and the mageia-dev mailing-list.