state of arm port
All doom and gloom? far away from that.
The good:
* Arm port is now third most popular port according to popcon.
* This mostly thanks to the popularity of Linksys NSLU-2, a tiny 80€ computer able to run Debian. Do you have a old pentium sucking up electricity in your closet? Do a service to earth and replace it with a NSLU-2!
* Armel (Arm EABI) is now at "63.41% up-to-date. That's 4515 packages built out of 7121". See the fancy Graph for the progress. Catching up sid has been achieved with just two buildd's (Thecus N2100) in my apartment and Aurelien Jarno building selected packages. Plus of course pioneering work from Lennert Buytenhek and people who created EABI in upstream.
* All core packages except apt (which hasn't seen a upload to sid since etch) have now armel support in official Debian packages.
* the old arm port has started catching up in up-to-dateness again, now that all buildd's have a recent enough kernel for glibc 2.5 (2.6.12+)
The bad:
* We need someone to take responsibility on the toolchain for arm. Java is semi broken on arm, Fortran, Java and objc need work for armel.
* There is still communications problems. It took quite a while to find out why glibc 2.5 doesn't work on some buildd's.
* People have lost interest in Bigendian arm port after nslu-2 started working with the regular Little-Endian arm port. General consensus is that bigendian port would only matter for highend networking gear.
The future:
* More supported devices. Now we support NSLU-2, Thecus N2100 and a few related IOP based devices plus netwinders. Arm boasts their partners shipped 2450 Million units based Arm technology in 2006. Would you like to run Debian on your brand new scsi RAID card? mp3 player? Cellphone? Internet Tablet? Washing machine? Your choice!
* Better recovery options. Many arm devices are headless, and if it crashes or doesn't boot, figuring out what went wrong is tricky. This is not really arm specific, but comes up often enough in debian-arm list.
* Anti-bloat festival. Many arm devices have very little storage and RAM available. To run debian on these, we need to figure out who to get rid of extra FAT. Less bloated software is everyones advantage.
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nchip) wrote,
