[CentOS-devel] CentOS port to the ARM architecture?

Tue Dec 19 08:50:55 UTC 2006
Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh at wantstofly.org>

Hi!

I'm interested in doing a CentOS port to the ARM architecture.

Due to ARM switching to a new ABI (EABI) that isn't 100% supported
until glibc 2.4/2.5-ish, kernel 2.6.16-ish and gcc 4.1, porting CentOS
4 isn't really an option if you want to run that new ABI.  But since
RHEL5 will have all the necessary versions of the above packages, I'd
be very interested in running a version of RHEL5 on my ARM boxes, since
I run CentOS (4.4 at the moment) on all my x86 machines as well.

So far I have about 80% of Fedora Core 6 built for ARM, and with some
minor gcc/glibc patching, it's been working pretty well for me so far.
I suspect that the same patches applied to RHEL5 will produce a working
version of RHEL5 for ARM without much effort.

I wonder what steps are necessary and what the criteria to become an
"official" CentOS arch port, apart from (obviously!) producing a set
of RPMS.


cheers,
Lennert