European Wafaa

It's been a little over a month since the last update and as always there has been progress :-) First let's get some of the numbers out of the way, currently we have 4202 packages built successfully, with 120 failed which is leading to 582 unresolvable. Remember this is for a full openSUSE Factory (12.2) build. Not bad, but we still have a way to go if we want to have an ARM port ready for 12.2's release - yes that is our hope and intention. Some of those packages that have built successfully still need tweaking, as an example mkinitrd and perl-Bootloader.

There has also been a change to the internal native build farm. This was what had been set up with the sponsored hardware to do a parralel build of Factory to verify that QEMU was indeed doing the job properly. It was previously setup using an development OBS instance for speed and as a proof of concept really. The internal native ARM build farm has now been moved to the IBS, this is the internal production instance that is used to many of SUSE's products. One of the advantages is that is has very good performance including uptime and is pretty stable compared to the sometimes unstable development instance that was used.

One of the reasons for this move to be made possible is that the team working on the ARM port have been able to sufficiently show that it is possible to build almost the complete distro for the ARM architecture and that it is maintainable. It is still *NOT* an official port and as such there is no commitment to make it an official product, but (yes there's always a but :-) ) it is a good showing that we are sufficiently advanced and that there is little holding us back, including dropping the many dirty hacks that were put in place to get things going.

Other than the uptime and performance advantage, moving to IBS also allows other interested developers within SUSE's network to quickly check out builds, submit patches or debug things on native hardware. It is still requested that submissions are made against the delopment projects within OBS but this way people can test there submissions before they get pushed out.

Another of the advancements since last time is that we now have working Kiwi based images for both the Pandaboard and Efika MX Smartbooks/Smarttops. The Efika images even have working graphics and sound \o/ We are still working on ironing out the build failures which will clear the unresolvable backlog slowly but surely. there will still be some packages that need deeper fixes, but they shall be conquered.

It isn't all rosey though, that would be boring. Several things are still outstanding (apart from fixing packages), we still have no integration with the distribution and there are plenty of issues with hardware-near items, so we have plenty of work to do. Saying that though there are more people joining in the fray using not only hardware that we have but also using their own ARM hardware to get some of the latter fixed. Part of the issue with hardware-near components is the state of the ARM kernel, each SoC still needs its own kernel until Device Tree is ready. So we don't plan on sitting back and sleeping, but more help is always welcome ;-)

To enable wider access to building on ARM there are several initiatives underway, one of them is to wait for the new Cortex-A15 based SoCs which will have full hardware support for the likes of KVM; but that's still a few months away before the first boards are available so other options are being investigated. Once something has been found and works hopefully we can have native arm builds on the OBS, but as I said that is still on the horizon and is a mid term goal at the earliest.

Much of this would not have been possible without the very kind sponsorship of devices from Genesi, Pandaboard.org/Texas Instruments, ARM and the openSUSE community. Also the hard work of the many members of our community; I'm going to try and name a few here and it is by no means an exhaustive list of people - Alex Graf, Adrian Schroeter, Dirk Muller, Marcus Schaefer, Bernhard Wiedemann, Michal Hruseky, Joop Boonen, Andreas Farber, Reinhard Max, Uli Hecht, Matthias Eckermann, Torsten Duwe and Tomas Cech. We have also had a load of help from engineers of Genesi themselves, ST-Ericsson, Linaro and also we would not have been able to get so far without much of the work that Ubuntu, Mer and Fedora have done. On behalf of the wider openSUSE Community, thank you to all of you!

Actually, I love openSUSE :-)

It's been almost a month since the last ARM porting update so here's a little christmas present to you all.

Dirk Müller sent out a status update to the mailing list, but I thought it would be a good idea post here for you scoundrels that aren't subscribed :-)

Thanks to some great work by loads of people including (but not limited to) Alex Graf, Adrian Schröter, Dirk Müller, Marcus Schäfer, Joop Boonen openSUSE's ARM port has come along nicely.  We are now at about 4200 successful packages out of a total of around 4700 for a complete distro, an increase of roughly 700 packages.

There are some localised issues for ARM but they are much much fewer than before. As we are building against Factory we naturally are affected by Factory's occaisional desire to break for the sake of breaking, but again those breakages are realtively few.

Marcus has managed to get Kiwi support to build ARM images (with a patch or two from Joop); Kiwi can run on Pandaboards, and also generate suitable images for for Pandaboards – the other boards and devices will come later. Alex, Dirk and Adrian have been busy beavering away as usual with package fixes, improvements to qemu and general OBS tweaks; they have also got the internal ARM OBS instance into a great shape, this is distributed between the Nürnberg and Prague offices and the nodes comprise of EfikaMX, Pandaboard & Beagleboard. It basically builds factory in parrelel to the public OBS but generally is more successful due to running on native hardware, whereas the public instance uses qemu which sometimes doesn't want to play nicely in the playground; we (well OK Alex) can then look at getting a fix for qemu or we import the succesful package into the OBS can move on. I'm still battling with kernels for the Snowball, but I think I'm almost there.

One of the bigger issues we have is that there is no graphics support, if you think graphics issues on x86 based systems is a pain wait till you look at it on ARM! ;-) This is being worked on so it's just a matter of time, there are ways and means around it but they are far from elegant.

As everyone likes videos, Joop has created another great video showing openSUSE running on a Pandaboard (Joop uses one of those aforementioned ways & means to get graphics working) and Michal Hrušecký has a video showing openSUSE on his Asus Transformer Tablet (yes it's still in a chroot but look at that ncurses yummyness :-) )

Just to remind you that you will be able to see first hand some of the ARM porting goodness at FOSDEM in Febuary so make sure you come along ;-) Till the next update, have a fun and Geeko filled time

I am very pleased to announce that ARM Holdings has joined our current sponsors, by providing a pile of Texas instruments OMAP4430 powered Pandaboards and some Samsung Exynos4210 powered Origen boards! Many thanks to the fine folks in Cambridge for their most generous donation.

In addition to that, thanks to the community's donations, we have also obtained an ST-Ericsson Nova A9500 powered Snowball board. Huge thanks to everyone that has made this happen. I know we originally were aiming for Pandaboards, but we need to make sure we aren't leaving anyone out. Saying that we still need some more, so don't stop helping out (please).

We are cracking on with getting things working, and even have openSUSE running natively on a few devices, although there are some very rough edges at the moment.

Sorry that no news has been dished out with regards to the openSUSE ARM porting effort, but that's mostly because things have been busy (honest!)

For starters we have now successfully built around 3500 packages out of a total of about 4700 for the full openSUSE ditribution. So we are well on our way. It hasn't been easy going though, and we still have lots of hurdles, hoops and obstacles to overcome.

Alex Graf has been beavering away into the small wee hours getting among things lots of fixes into qemu to help with builds, fixing kernel builds that I and Adrian Schroeter created, and generally being an engineering machine.

As I mentioned Adrian Schroeter has been busy with creating as generic a kernel as possible to be used in the OBS with qemu. He has also been busy fixing packages in association with Dirk Mueller, Reinhard Max and others.

Joop Boonen built u-boot and submitted it into the relevant devel project. So we now have the means to properly boot an ARM based system.

I've been busy building hardware specific kernels, which I'm still learning how to do properly. As it stands we have kernels built for Freescale powered EfikaMXs, Texas Instruments powered Pandboards & Beagleboards, Nvidia powered Tegra2 devices (mainly Trimslice) and soon ST-Ericsson powered NovaThor devices like the Snowball.

Work is still on going, one really good thing is Kiwi support for ARM is being worked on. Marcus Schaefer has rolled his sleeves up and is attacking it with gusto, and making good progress. It is by no means a done deal, yet. It does show though how versatile openSUSE's toolsets are. Hopefully it won't be too long until we can get things working, and hey maybe even get those fine folks in SUSE Studio to add ARM as an architecture so that we can have highly customised ARM builds :-)

As I also mentioned, the kernels aren't perfect yet. So we still need to do more testing and fine tuning. One item that was identified (by Alex of course) was that we have an issue with unwinding. There is a "hack" identified to get things working but a proper fix is still being sought.

We also have some exception handling issues which prevents us from builing Java and Java related apps which in turn are preventing us from building a lot of the remaining 1200 or so packages. We do still have some packages that need fixing which don't require any of the exception crippled packages, so feel free to jump in ;-)

There are some areas that still need some love on ARM, like hwinfo and also our darling YaST. X drivers are also a bit of a grey area, actually they're more likely to be missing.

All in all we still have our work cut out for us, but we are making good progress.  I can't say when we will have working images for people to try, so don't ask; but trust me, I will make sure to let you all know when we do. I am hoping to have something working in time for FOSDEM and hopefully show it off there.

Just to give you an idea of what we are using the hardware that has been donated so far: EfikaMXs are currently employed natively building packages, one of the issues we have with qemu is that it can be tempremental at times and isn't suited really as a long term solution as it stands. So the EfikaMXs build all the the failed packages to make sure that qemu isn't at fault - we found a load of packages built, and as such were imported into the OBS to get things rolling on. They are also being used to help out with Kiwi support. Pandaboards are being used for testing and bug hunting mostly, but also for packaging. There is also one device of each type for kernel testing/tuning.

So if you're interested and aren't afraid of getting your hands dirty (or occaisionally burnt) do join in. Jump on IRC (#opensuse-arm on freenode) and let's have fun together.  Oh and don't forget this is a community effort and as such we still need a bit more funding to get some more devices.

For those that aren't subscribed to the openSUSE Project Mailinglist:

As was announced last month, the Board is looking for some new blood. As such I intend to run for one of the available seats. Yes people, your lovable FunkyPenguin is hoping to be able to represent you and all your crazy ideas (I've got some of those myself ;-) ).

I know of a few other candidates that are running, and they're fine upstanding folk of the openSUSE community. I believe you should think long and hard about who you would like to represent you.  The Board is in place for you, the community, and as such it is up to you to say whom you would like to represent you.

For those that don't know me: I'm known as FunkyPenguin on IRC, I often wear a kilt, I've been a contributor to openSUSE for at least five years and been a user for much much longer. As part of my contributions I was very active in the GNOME team, I helped to bring the now defunct MeeGo UI to openSUSE, and lately I'm helping to port openSUSE to ARM, as well as general packaging of bits and bobs.

I'm a fairly no-nonsense kind of chap, and I will say things as I see them (I will endeavour to ensure I take people's sensibilities into account too). I also like to believe I'm an approachable person, so if you want to speak to me off the grid then that's fine too, although I do prefer open communication.

So for now in the words of Porky Pig, that's all folks! I'll be speaking to you (and hopefully not at you) soon.

Andy

The big update is that a couple of kind companies have stepped up and sponsored some hardware for the effort to get openSUSE on ARM. Huge thank you to:

They have kindly sponsored and shipped several EfikaMX devices. Thanks to Peter Czanik for organising this on our behalf.

Ti in association with the PandaBoard community have kindly sponsored and are shipping several PandaBoards.

Thank you, this is a huge help.

Now that we have some devices on our way it doesn't mean we can sit back and relax, we still need more devices. Yes, I'm going to say it again - Please help the Geeko and donate as much or as little as you can (preferably not zero ;-) ).

So what else is new? Well openSUSE has managed to run on a couple of modern ARM devices. Joop Boonen managed to get openSUSE running on his PandaBoard. He even made a couple of videos:

First boot of openSUSE ARM port on Pandaboard

First Boot of a openSuSE ARM port on Pandaboard via monitor/keyboard and serial operation

Michal Hrušecký managed to get openSUSE running on his ASUS Transformer Tablet (albeit in a chroot), he has also provided information on how to do this yourself if you're feeling brave :)

We still don't have anything that we can release yet, as we are still working to fix packages. We are fighting forward and we will succeed!!

So HackWeek VII has been and gone, but work has not stopped in getting our beloved Geeko some ARMs.

Now I'll be the first to admit, things have been a wee bit scrappy in places. This isn't anyone's fault, it's just that we want to get things rolling ASAP. Thing is, we need more haste less speed; we need to be somewhat more concerted with our efforts. So instead of trying to get everything to build in one hit (would be great if that was possible), we are going to target patterns of packages.

With that in mind Joop Boonen was good enough to pull up a list of the packages required to build the Jeos pattern, I've added it to the wiki in a table to show the status of the required packages. If you would like to help out, look at the the Jeos Package List page and add your name in the column and when you submit a fix pop the SR number in too.

Once we have the Jeos list complete, we can then move on as each subsequent package set will build on this. Next up will be the Minimal X, after that we get onto the big bad boys of GNOME/KDE/LXDE/XFCE.

One item that is holding us back is hardware - we are encountering a whole heap of issues with Qemu, which takes time to resolve and as such takes time away from getting things working. So please help us out by donating as much or as little as you can to the effort.

As I mentioned before, we have an initial target platform identified for testing the work of all those involved in the openSUSE ARM port. The problem is we need to obtain the hardware.

I am in discussions trying to get some corporate sponsorship of hardware, but we can not rely soley on those kind companies that would like to see us succeed. We as a community need to help ourselves succeed, as such I've set up a campaign on Pledgie to enable us the community to contribute to the effort for obtaining hardware.

With these funds, we the community will be able to purchase 5 (maybe more) PandaBoards which will help developers fix packages and also test the port to ensure everything works. Until the new ARM based chipsets are released, which could be the middle of next year, we will also need a substantial number of boards to provide a decent enough amount of compute power for OBS to build natively.  OBS is great, but there are limitations with emulating the environment in Qemu. Having physical hardware will remove these limitations and enable us to prove that openSUSE is a world class ARM distirbution.

So please help us to help you, donate what you can so that we can reach our goal of €1,000.

I just sent this into the -arm mailing list.

This is a hot topic, and one that seems to generate the most noise.

I've had a discussion with several people about target hardware, and I've also looked at what our peers are doing and saying. At the same time I've been trying to see what options we have for getting some sponsorship for hardware.

There were three devices in the running, all are classed as development boards - so no case or external prettyness (beauty comes from within anyway):

TI PandaBoard
Samsung Origen
ST Ericsson Snowball

After discussing, the preferred nominee is the PandaBoard. Several factors led to this decision, it has an integrated wired network connection; is well supported by the incumbant distros; widely used within the wider ARM open source community; and it has Pandas (OK only in name but still!)

So if you want to prep and get some hardware, then go for the PandaBoard (as soon as the Cortex A15 is released, we'll be looking at them).

Yes, I know it's a developer board and not an end user product. Unfortunately there aren't actually that many end user products that you can sensibly use for development at the moment. Sure, there's the TrimSlice the DreamPlug and a few others, but after consulting someone that is far more knowledgable and aware of the wider landscape, we went with their recommendations.

Oh and things are moving pretty fast folk!! \o/

One of the things that came out of the recent Geeko Love-In for me was a new project to immerse myself in within openSUSE. Yeah I know, we have enough existing projects already so why create a new one? Simples! Believe it or not but openSUSE is behind the curve in a specific segment, and that segment has yet to explode to its full potential. That segment is ARM.

No I'm not talking about your upper body appendages, but the architecture that powers most of your little devices (and some bigger ones too). Almost all smartphones, tablets and many other consumer devices are powered by ARM from one of the numerous licensees.

Didn't openSUSE do something about this a while ago? Yes we did. Unfortunately the effort seems to have bitrotted somewhat, there were numerous reasons and I don't even prophesise to know the all either.

As such I'm going to try and kickstart things, and see it through and hopefully see it grow.  As I mentioned, this idea came up at the conference when I was talking to numerous people (I forget how it all started, but that doesn't really matter). There was an overwhelmingly positive view on the matter, and that for me was all that counts. Now let me be crystal clear here, *THIS WILL NOT BE A ONE MAN SHOW!!* I mentioned previously that my view is that we as a community are pretty lazy at times with getting our hands dirty. As such if you think things are going slow or not going in the direction you would like, don't moan. Get your hands dirty and help make a difference.

The process will not be an easy one either, so don't expect a port to magically appear over night. If we're lucky we might be able to have a working port in 6 months. Maybe longer, maybe shorter; ultimately that lies with us as a community. 

Stage one has begun already thanks to Adrian Schroeter, Alex Graf and Dirk Mueller. Stage one comprises of getting the boot strap process to work. At a cursory level this means getting the packages required for setting up a build chroot environment and for building these packages on the target ARM architecture. This will possibly take a fair amount of time, and no I won't give any timelines for this - how long is a piece of string?

openSUSE has a couple of advantages here, 1) we have the OBS which can cross build and if need be cross compile packages for numerous architectures (ARM included) so we are going to make a start with that; 2) SUSE are going to be doing another HackWeek (I think it is next week) which means Adrian, Alex, Dirk and anyone else that has knowledge, experience or interest can join in the fun and pain almost full time for a week - let's not kid ourselves here there is a high probability for lots of pain, but also fun ;-) Thing is HackWeek is not just for SUSE staff, it is also for the community. You can join in and spend some quality time on the project with those that know a whole heap of stuff, and learn from them and maybe even teach them something too.

We are going to be targeting ARMv7 nothing older I'm afraid this means CORTEX-A8 and above (looking at A9 primarily and then the new A15 when it's available), it gets too messy otherwise and it is already messy enough.If you have knowledge and experience, please help out. If you don't take part you have no justification to complain - you've got to be in it to win it ;-)

So I'm basically just giving you all a heads up on this effort, and will update you as regularily as possible (I'm hoping to do something weekly maybe). In the meantime, if you're interested join #opensuse-arm on Freenode and the opensuse-arm mailing list. *DO NOT HARRASS* for updates, if there is something to say it will be said. If you've got a question, ask and *WAIT* for an answer. If you want to help out but want to know how ask and *WAIT* for an answer. I will try and get something on the wiki soon, with a todo list etc.

Thanks and here's to getting our Geeko some ARMs.