Subject: [alpine-devel] ARM support

From: qnx4ever <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2015 00:15:54 +0300

Hello gents,I have just tried Debian on my HTC Vision and it runs like a
charm. Do you think we ever going to get there with Alp ?
http://sven-ola.dyndns.org/repo/debian-kit-en.html
Btw, any reco on simple compute cluster kits for Alp ? I wish openMosix was
ever ported to newer kernels ;(.

From: Timo Teras <timo.teras_at_iki.fi
<timo.teras_at_iki.fi?Subject=Re%3A%20%5Balpine-devel%5D%20ARM%20CPU%20Support>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2014 13:19:21 +0300

Hi,

On Thu, 3 Apr 2014 11:48:20 +0200
Florian Heigl <florian.heigl_at_gmail.com> wrote:

*> there was a recent question about what ARM based hardware people care*
*> about / wished it had Alpine support.*
*>*
*> In my case I use the following:*
*>*
*> Raspi (Debian atm, would only switch if all funny performance patches*
*> are available, because otherwise it’s just too slow) It does NTP,*
*> DHCP, DNS*

Can you define 'performance patches'? We are currently building only
armhf variant (hard-float), which is the major performance issue. Also
we do linux-rpi (non-grsec) kernel with the github stuff applied
(planning to push it to aports today).

There is also some omxplayer, and some otherstuff packaged. But eg. Qt
is not compiled with the rpi stuff; at least not yet. Need to figure
out how to do that nicely.

*> 2x CubieTruck (Debian, would love to “free” them). They’re my Apache,*
*> Monitoring and MooseFS storage nodes, etc. I know some other Alpine*
*> users also have them. They’re a nice deal, two cores, 2GB Ram, NAND.*
*> They’re not 100% ready for a stock kernel, afaik.*
*>*
*> 3x Zyxel NSA 325 Nas (Still on stock plus a Debian chroot. I might*
*> switch them to Arch, but I’d love something that runs natively on the*
*> NAND and not off USB)*
*>*
*> 1x Nexus7 - Running Ubuntu, I’ll probably change this back to*
*> Android. It’s the only of the pack that has a good CPU, but it lacks*
*> support for parallel USB devices and charging.*

For everything else, I'd like to just ship single multiplatform kernel.
If these are doable by just enabling proper kernel config / u-boot
image, it'll be simple to add. We can consider adding patches to -grsec
kernel if they are not too intrusive and apply to -grsec tree.

I'm also consider if we should in addition to 'armhf' variant provide a
dedicated build for armv7+ that defaults to build everything in thumb2
mode. Seems that rpi is really the only armv6 thing in the wild. All
other popular boards start to be armv7.

*> I hope this gives some overview of whats out there in the wild.*

Yeah. Thanks.