On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 06:22:38PM -0800, Mike Thompson wrote: > I am potentially interested in creating/maintaining a Debian port that > would mirror the work being done in armhf, but with the port tuned to the > specifics of the Raspberry Pi hardware which I believe is ARMv6+VFPv2. The > goal would be a Debian distribution on the Raspberry Pi which would squeeze > the most performance possible from the CPU/MPU on the $25 to $35 device. It > seems that such an effort could piggyback off the efforts of those working > on armhf so it could be managed by a small group of volunteers.
Hmm I thought armhf did ARMv6, but no, it uses thumb-2 which apparently means ARMv7. Certainly a lot of the work going into armhf to get vfp and such working should help. So what would you name armhf for ARMv6? > I don’t have experience with managing such a project, but I’m a fairly > quick learner and could hopefully leverage past experience with maintaining > builds of FreeBSD years ago. I've been a user of Debian for many years and > as a user I'm quit impressed with the community that supports it. I've > never been let down. With this in mind, I have a few questions to > understand what would be involved in such an effort. > > > First, is there an existing group of volunteers already looking to support > the Raspberry Pi hardware in this manner? If so, I could look to lend a > helping hand rather than trying to duplicate working being done by others > that potentially have much more experience/knowledge of what would be > involved. > > > Second, where would I start to understand what is involved with creating a > Debain port that supports a specific set of hardware such as the Raspberry > Pi. Obviously the archive management and autobuilding tools will have to > learned. Hopefully this path has been followed enough that it’s fairly > well documented and not tribal knowledge. Having looked at that recently, I am not so sure it is clearly documented how to setup a buildd. Maybe I just haven't found it yet. > Third, beyond time to learn everything involved and organize whatever other > volunteers might help, what would be required in terms of hardware, network > bandwidth, etc… A person I’ve communicated with on the Raspberry Pi forums > indicated that cluster of six Freescale i.MX535 Quick Start boards with > SATA hard disks may be enough to get started with. If figure this could > probably be had for about $2000 or perhaps less. I got my i.MX53 QSB for $100 as a special, but $150 is the normal price. It makes a quite good build machine since it is pretty fast and has 1GB ram. An i.MX6 based board with multiple cores (and being Cortex-A9 and hence faster than the A8) would be even better, but I think those cost a lot more too, if they even have any starter boards for those yet. > Finally, what high-level things should be thought through before starting > such a project. I’m certain many projects like this get started all the > time just to whither on the vine for various reasons. I would like to > avoid that scenario if possible. > > > Thank you for any feedback or information. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-arm-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120307151314.gh14...@caffeine.csclub.uwaterloo.ca
