[Arm-netbook] [review] SoC proposal

[Gordan Bobic]

Bari Ari wrote:

> You might be surprised by how quickly GCC support can come together for 
> a new cpu core that is also driven by a cooperative open software 
> community without any hidden agendas, control issues or confused management.

Sure, but these things take time to stabilize. ARMv7 hard-float hardware 
has been around for quite a while, and only in the last few months has 
it been possible to actually rebuild the whole distro with GCC for ARM 
hard-float.

And it isn't just about GCC - it's about the entire package set. There 
are a lot of things that still don't build/work on ARM, not even 
armv5tel target, despite that having been around for years.

GCC + kernel + glibc is a great start, but if you are coming up with a 
whole new arch from scratch, it's still going to take quite a long time 
before package maintainers acquire the hardware and the inclination to 
support the architecture.

I'm not saying this is unachievable (even if it means sending a dev kit 
to maintainers of all 2000-4000+ packages in a typical Linux distro), 
but I don't think the issue should be trivialized.

It took me 3-4 months of evenings and weekends to just get (at least all 
the important things) RHEL6 to build on ARM. It took patching 71 
packages. Most (but certainly not all) of what was required to be fixed 
already had at least provisional patches upstream, but a lot required 
back/forward porting patches, and some things I had to fix myself.

And that's on an arch where the version of Fedora (12) that RHEL6 is 
based on was already (mostly) working on ARM.

But a whole new architecture, with all the debugging and testing that 
will take? Sure it's possible, and I'll stick my ore in and help if it 
looks like it's going to help, but the scale of the task seems 
impossible to over-estimate.

Gordan