Fedora 18 Comes To ARMv6, Raspberry Pi

[hansdegoede]

Allwinner A10 Linux support

No doubt about it. There are plenty of ARM-based mini PCs around with specs higher than the Pi's, but they do cost a little bit more. I like the Hackberry and Cubieboard (both from http://www.miniand.com) a lot, although it takes a bit of effort to get Linux up and running on the Allwinner A10 SoC that they use, and I haven't been able to successfully use one with an everyday RGB-based DVI monitor. The next one I want to try is the Wandboard Dual (http://www.wandboard.org/), based on a Freescale SoC that is supposed to be better documented than the Allwinner offerings.

Hi,

Actually dvi monitor support for Allwinner A10 devices has been fixed a while back. I know because I spend en entire weekend banging all the bits in the hdmi controller 1 bit a time unitl I found one which dropped it from hdmi to dvi mode

The A10 socs are being actively support by the linux-sunxi community, see:

http://linux-sunxi.org/

If you want to give things a shot with a more recent linux-sunxi kernel + distro, try the ready-to-use (just dd to an sdcard) Fedora 18 images I maintain:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/AllwinerA10

Regards,

Hans

[archibald]

The raspberry pi did it's job. Now it is time for the rpi foundation to do a similar push to mainstream the 64bit ARMs. A little higher price point for a "power user pi" with A-57 ?

I think you're misunderstanding the Foundation's goals. Mainstream support isn't something they're interested in. They are interested in improving computer science education; if they help programming become mainstream, then that's fine by them, but they don't want to do something that will fracture the community. Moving to a 64-bit ARM or a newer generation simply wouldn't help them.

[varikonniemi]

The raspberry pi did it's job. Now it is time for the rpi foundation to do a similar push to mainstream the 64bit ARMs. A little higher price point for a "power user pi" with A-57 ?

[hwertz]

In case anyone wondered "Why?", the Debian team reports substantial performance improvements by running armhf (ARM with "hard float" support, requiring ARMv7 with NEON or newer) compared to running armel (ARM little endian, requiring ARMv4 or up.)

The ARM ports do not use FPU traps like x86 used to have "back in the day" (allows the 386 without a 387 math coprocessor, or the 486sx, to run binaries with FPU code in them), but instead programs are either built hard float (won't run at all on FPUless ARMs), soft float (has FPU instructions, but uses some kind of calls to check for FPU support and jump to software implementation if FPU support is lacking), or binaries built with no FPU code at all. Softfloat is still far faster than "no FPU support" on systems with an FPU, but hard float is 30% faster than that. Just wanted to let people know, these distros did not take dropping <ARMv7 lightly, the speedup was simply too substantial to ignore.

[hiddenmaverick]

There lots of other SBC/SoC too, but they don't seem to have the same momentum and community as the Raspberry.

No doubt about it. There are plenty of ARM-based mini PCs around with specs higher than the Pi's, but they do cost a little bit more. I like the Hackberry and Cubieboard (both from http://www.miniand.com) a lot, although it takes a bit of effort to get Linux up and running on the Allwinner A10 SoC that they use, and I haven't been able to successfully use one with an everyday RGB-based DVI monitor. The next one I want to try is the Wandboard Dual (http://www.wandboard.org/), based on a Freescale SoC that is supposed to be better documented than the Allwinner offerings.

[tbelvin]

I wish PengPod or other arm devices had the same support as RasberryPi.

I wish the new multitouch enabled in recent kernels didn't disable single touch in older arm tablets. More wireless and webcam drivers are needed too.

[dee.]

I wish Raspberry Pi was ARMv7. Still supporting ARMv6 when ARMv8 is about to ship soon

Correction: already shipping...

http://www.apm.com/products/x-gene

[uid313]

I wish Raspberry Pi was ARMv7. Still supporting ARMv6 when ARMv8 is about to ship soon is such a waste of time. At least I hope the next-gen Raspberry Pi skips ARMv7 and goes to ARMv8 (with Cortex A53, I suppose), although the "damage" is already done with the first one, and now Linux distros will have to support all 3 ARM architectures for a very long time.

I agree.

I really look forward to all the ARM architecture unification work done in the Linux kernel 3.7 and 3.10.
Linux kernel 3.7 brought ARMv8 64-bit support and early experimental work the architecture unification.
Linux kernel 3.9 brought KVM support on ARM.
Linux kernel 3.10 brings further work on the architecture unification work started in version 3.7.

So we can build one ARM image that works across many boards instead of have board-specific distribution re-spins.

ARMv6 feels so legacy and crappy, and the world has moved, so I really wish the Raspberry was ARMv7.
I am really looking forward to ARMv8 and 64-bit.

There lots of other SBC/SoC too, but they don't seem to have the same momentum and community as the Raspberry.

[riklaunim]

It's all about price and availability. You can get quad core Exynos CPU on Odroid board, or A15 on Arndale, but at much higher price than the Raspberry. Anything that could keep the price would be Chinese Allwinner single and optionally dual core chips (ARMv7), but I doubt that they would switch to that. Either so if you put a better ARM CPU it still will be rather to slow for typical desktop usage (Exynos is almost a good replacement), and for electronics hacking you don't need extreme performance.

BTW: my mini computers benchmark: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...FO-1305102FO57

[Krysto]

I wish Raspberry Pi was ARMv7. Still supporting ARMv6 when ARMv8 is about to ship soon is such a waste of time. At least I hope the next-gen Raspberry Pi skips ARMv7 and goes to ARMv8 (with Cortex A53, I suppose), although the "damage" is already done with the first one, and now Linux distros will have to support all 3 ARM architectures for a very long time.