[Arm-netbook] RedSleeve - New ARM Linux Distro

[Gordan Bobic]

Deano Calver wrote:
>>> I should add that Ubuntu 12.04 will have ARMv7 hard-float binary
> packages.
>> Sure it will, but those aren't going to include proprietary binary drivers
> until the upstream vendors make them available in hard-float variants.
> Nvidia certainly don't do that yet, and I suspect most of
> the others don't either.
 >
> Hardware blobs are really only important in the desktop arena inho, given
> Red Sleeve is an 'enterprise' distro I'd expect most users will be server
> users (my main area of interest in ARM at the mo), in that case I won't be
> using most hardware blobs unless is for things like crypto, not gonna waste
> my precious ram on GPU that I'm not going to use (by the time good OpenCL
> drivers exists for ARM GPUs that might be useful for servers I'll have less
> hair than I have now!).

Indeed, and if your interest is in servers, most servers don't do 
FP-heavy things (the likes of Apache and MySQL mostly just shuffle data 
around, without doing FP number crunching). So hard-float isn't really 
that much of a win, IMO, but I'm willing to consider concrete benchmark 
results based on server application workloads.

> I suspect that the armv7 hard float + vfp + thumb2 will become the standard
> format for this generation of server ARM distros, with some hard core
> distros supporting the older platforms (ala Ubuntu 12 and Debian). NEON is
> an interesting one, because most do support it, I wouldn't be surprised if
> those chips that don't silently get forgotten about and treated like the
> older platforms, NEON is a fairly good vector ISA and will become used a lot
> in multimedia apps (even if via asm or instrinsics). Even servers will
> likely want the jpeg and mpeg acceleration that will come from its usage
> imho.

I think you are getting ahead of reality on several things here, 
including availability for purchase of the current generation of proper 
servers. It will also be years before the ARMv7 SoCs without NEON 
disappear. As I mentioned, Tegra2 doesn't have NEON and is one of the 
most popular A9 class chips out there.

Gordan