elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

ARM enablement nearly complete; testing needed

To : elementary-dev-community@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

: elementary-dev-community@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx From : "Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

: "Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date : Sat, 15 Dec 2012 03:14:39 +0300

: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 03:14:39 +0300 Sender: shnatsel@xxxxxxxxx

Hey guys, The armhf enablement of Daily PPA is nearly complete now. The only remaining items are failed builds of some Switchboard plugs which should resolve themselves in an hour or two. In all other respects armhf situation is 1:1 equal to the i386 and amd64 ones. And guess what it means? Exactly - it's time to test this stuff! If you happen to be running Ubuntu's armhf port, please take a backup of your system (just in case), add ppa:elementary-os/daily to your software sources and install the "pantheon" package (or cherrypick whatever dependencies of it you prefer). Then check out how apps work (and if they work at all) and report your findings to this mailing list! I don't anticipate any major issues in applications because all Vala code is translated to C+GLib code and thus is portable by definition. Also, we're not yet in a position to consider any crashes appearing on ARM architecture-specific :) I don't code in Vala myself so developers may correct me on this point further in this thread. Still, SoCs may have different performance bottlenecks than desktops do, so please report anything that works unusually slowly. The situation with Pantheon Shell is more interesting. In theory, Gala should run on OpenGL ES 2.0 (and OpenGL 1.3 too, which took me by surprise). However, I'm not aware of anybody actually trying that. So if you happen to have hardware 3D acceleration on your ARM device, please test Gala and report your findings. Don't forget to include the output of "es2_info" command! Also, it would be nice to be able to retrace Apport crashes submitted from armhf, so that developers can investigate and fix them. This requires an armhf-capable machine to run the retracer on. If you have any resources to spare on an armhf-capable server you run, or know how to set up ARMv7 emulation on amd64, please contact me. Kudos to Rico for making the armhf enablement happen! -- Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff OS architect @ elementary

Follow ups