Fedora Is Still Unsure About ARM Support

While Ubuntu support for ARM hardware is in great shape with Canonical investing significantly in the rapidly-growing ARM-based mobile market and the to-be-growing ARM server-space, plus other Linux distributions taking on ARM, official support for Fedora on ARM hasn't been quick to come by. In fact, Fedora developers still remain unconvinced about taking on ARM as a primary architecture.

For over the past week there's been very long discussions going on within the Fedora development camp about ARM as a primary architecture and then the primary architecture promotion requirements. Some view that there's not enough ARM hardware available, it would take too long to build the Fedora archive under ARM, etc. (There's already been some to specifically point out otherwise with hardware like the Trim-Slice, PandaBoard ES, NVIDIA Tegra 3, and other popular devices.)

Bringing on ARM support within Fedora was brought up during Monday's FESCO (Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee). It was another long discussion; the meeting logs are available. They decided to establish a sub-committee to investigate the requirements for formal promotion of different architectures to be considered a primary architecture or secondary architecture. ARM may end up being a secondary architecture, which would be similar to being a "PA" (primary architecture) but with a different Koji build status and ARM bugs would not be considered release blockers for Fedora.

There is though unofficial Fedora ARM builds already for recent releases, among other Fedora ARM initiatives, which are all documented on this Fedora Project architectures Wiki page.