arm Release Recertification

Purpose

The purpose of this page is to collate the info necessary to demonstrate that arm meets the architecture recertification criteria for etch.

Availability

The architecture is publicly available without NDAs via:

  1. Aleph One (Balloonboard)

  2. Simtec (CATS, Bast, ...)

  3. ADS (Bitsyx, VGX, AGX, ...)

  4. Linksys (NSLU2)

  5. Arcom (Viper, ...)

  6. ARM Corp (Integrator?)

  7. Nokia (770)

  8. iRiver PMP-120/140, GPL'd firmware

  9. Intel (IXDP240x, IXP28xx, ...)

  10. Radisys (ENP-2611, ENP-2605, ...)

  11. PePLink (MANGA, MANGA Mini, ...)

  12. Castle (Iyonix)

  13. Loft (IXP42x)

  14. Glomation (GESBC-9312-sc, ...)

  15. Technologic Systems (TS-7200, TS-7250, TS-7260, ...)

  16. LogicPD (PXA270 Card Engine) oh, and about 100 others.

Developer machines

The following machines are available to developers:

  1. Bill Gatliff (bgat) maintains leisner.debian.org. (leisner.ballgatliff.com) 200Mhz, 64Mb RAM machine, with NFS chroots installed at his hosting provider. Now set up for general developer access. Online 2006-01-05. Available to developers 2006-01-25. He has now donated hedges.billgatliff.com, a much faster machine. There is not yet a timeline for this becoming a buidd or developer machine.

  2. agnesi.debian.org. Thanx to Joey Hess for making this happen, I believe.

  3. Vince Sanders (Kyllikki) maintains a machine to which developers can be given specific access. jennifer.kyllikki.org port 1022. Mail vince@debian.org to ask for an account.

Ask on debian-arm@l.d.o or on irc.debian.org#debian-arm if you need access, or packages installing for build purposes.

Port maintainers

The Debian port is maintained by the following developers, who are familiar with arch-specific issues for this port

  1. Vince Sanders (kyllikki)
  2. Phil Blundell (pb)
  3. Wookey
  4. Riku Voipio (nchip) (not that familiar yet..)
  5. Lennert Buytenhek (buytenh)
  6. Kenshi Muto (kmuto) (not so familiar, but is running experimental/non-free/volatile/testing-secure buildd and d-i autobuilder)
  7. GuillemJover (guillem)

  8. Martin Michlmayr (tbm) [debian-installer work]
  9. Colin Tuckley (colin)
  10. Aurelien Jarno (aurel32)
  11. Sune Vuorela (pusling) (during release time)

Users

The port is being actively used at the following sites:

  1. Kyllikki:
  2. Simtec Ltd: "This is insane...Simtec alone can say we have several thousand users just from our dev. boards..."
  3. Wookey at home: 1 netwinder, 2 users, firewall/P2P server
  4. Aleph One Ltd: 2 machines, 2 users, various
  5. Martin Michlmayr: 1 netwinder, 1 user?
  6. ADS maintains a Debian board farm with currently 7 machines and at least 4 regular users.
  7. Adam Powell at home: 1 netwinder, 2 users
  8. Movial, Iyonix machine for scratchbox cpu transparency, ~20 active users, and a pile of arm tablets running a debian fork
  9. Company X, several Iyonix and Simtec CATS machines, tens of users.
  10. Jeroen Massar; Currently 2 NSLU2's for devel + storage etc, 2 other NLSU's optionally for dedicated debian usage + 1 iRiver PMP-140 (debian support is in the pipe! :)

  11. Lennert at home: 1 enp2611, 1 double espresso (dual ixp2350 board), 1 TS-7250, 1 LogicPD PXA270
  12. LIACS, NL: 2 enp2611s, 1 enp2605, 1 ixdp2850, 10 users total
  13. PAMurray, US: 1 Manga, 2 users total
  14. PePLink customer poll: http://forum.peplink.com/viewtopic.php?t=140 currently shows 5 users so far

  15. UCSD Extension, US: Embedded Linux course, recommended hardware
  16. Silas Bennett: Currently use a PePLink Manga running Debian for my primary Firewall/Router.
  17. Peter Teichmann: Simtec Bast is used as Router/Server, Iyonix machine for development (1 user)
  18. Bdale Garbee: Netwinder, Manga Balance Plus, various embedded target boards (2 users)
  19. wiDrone : 3 nslu2; hosting backup for charity webhost (15 users), slush diskspace served thru samba (4 users), devhost for testing (1 user)
  20. martinwguy: public-access 200MHz 64M Armadillo; 6 personal accounts.

Popcon indicates 825 systems running popcon on the Debian arm port as of 2007/08/21. Popcon indicates 22 systems running armeb as of 2006/02/22.

'User' is difficult to define for arm: We have a range of users with varying degrees of 'purity' in terms of their Debian usage. Which ones count?

For NSLU2 usage, see: What People Are Using Their Slugs For, note that this page mentions Unslung/Openslug. The latter branch will most likely go up into a full Debian install over time. Of course, this is only possible when Debian community supports it. Have a look at this to see people who are running a 'debian based' os on their armeb nslu2.

Installer

The installer is being maintained by Martin Michlmayr and it's currently working effectively. Successful installation reports are available at: ...

Upstream support

Upstream support is provided by:

Toolchain is currently in good shape, upstream considers arm-linux-gnu one of the primary targets. In future they might focus on EABI side, which will be used by the armel Debian port.

Archive coverage and Autobuilder support

The port is 98-99%% up-to-date (that is the figure ignoring the ~3% of the archive that is specified not to be built on arm - overall arm has built 98.0% of the archive). Build failures are due to issues with java support. The percentage of packages failing to build or unbuildable has reduced significantly in 2006 (from 95% to 98%) due to sterling efforts by many people.

This page monitors the current state of problematic packages: ArmBuilddWatch (Anyone wanting to help should look here for things that need working on)

Archive cleanliness

The port builds from unmodified Debian source.

Autobuilders

The following machines run buildds for the port:

completed buildd builds are all signed and uploaded by elmo.

Key

Offered:

Vetoes

The security team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:

The Debian admin team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:

The release team have noted the following problems in supporting the architecture:


CategoryEtchReleaseRecertification