Sorry for many of you may already see this already. I just realized that the simple reply was sent to meego-community only, while I think it is a more proper topic for meego-dev.
Thanks. JD Zheng ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: ezjd <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 11:46 AM Subject: [Meego-community] HW/Chip requirement for default MeeGo repo (was Re: Meego on non-SSSE3 CPUs?) To: [email protected] Hi All, Well it is April 1st, but I am not joking ... I'd like to make it a more general discussion on HW/Chip requirement for MeeGo as we just had the first code drop and head to a open development model. We all know that initially MeeGo will run on Intel Atom and Nokia N900, however, the repo built for them has slightly different level of requirement for CPU requirement, for example, this SSSE3 is needed for x86 while a lot of x86 chip doesn't have it, in another hand, ARM v5 (w/o VFP?) is for N900 while N900 has a Cotex-A8 which is actually ARMv7 with VFP, i.e., x86 build for MeeGo requires more on CPU than ARM build for MeeGo. (BTW, PAE kernel is another similar thing) So what device do we expect MeeGo to run w/o rebuilding the whole repo? Most desktop linux distribution builds binary package for 686 or even 586/486 instead of any newer CPU from Intel or AMD, that I think the developers want the distribution to be used on as much as PC w/o rebuilding. Can we do similar thing for MeeGo? Is it important for more people to try/develop MeeGo on as much as PC/device with CPU from different vendors? As a new open source project, the adoption by users and developer is really important from my point of view, I feel we make it more difficult because the default repo needs more CPU functionality, which isn't generally available. There is always argument that, for example, SSE3 can provide more performance boost. I don't want to start a performance maesurement project for this question and I'd ask only one question: is this performance benifit worth the possiblility of losing users/contributor? It isn't saying that we need to keep as low as possible for CPU requirement. I saw another good example that when Ubuntu started to support ARM, it started with ARMv5 in 9.04 then now they are building for ARMv6 with VFP. I'd suggest to do similar thing, starting from relatively lower requirement and let user feedback to decide. And another suggestion is we can leave it to chip/device vendor to provide customized pre-built repo for their MeeGo and my guess is that in most cases, it will be just a customized kernel. I understand that x86 build might come from moblin and frankly that is one of the reasons I didn't spend much time on moblin because I couldn't even try it on most of my PC. I hope people like me won't feel similar thing with MeeGo in the future. Thanks. JD On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Graham Cobb <[email protected]<g%[email protected]> > wrote: > On Thursday 01 April 2010 15:54:25 David Greaves wrote: > > Ross Kendall wrote: > > > I just wanted to ask if anyone knew if the current Meego code will work > > > on non-SSSE3 CPUs? > > > > I think the answer is "No", if you have an AMD cpu or an older Intel cpu > > then you can't run any of the Meego code. Yes this makes life more than a > > tad difficult for local builds. > > Is there any technical reason why there should not be a target built using > a > lower CPU requirement? I am not suggesting changing the current target -- > presumably it corresponds to some device one of the participating companies > wants to target. But for community development we need an aditional target > which will run on pretty much any x86 CPU and we need to make sure that > subsequent releases include building everything for that target. > > This is necessary so that community members can develop and test on > ordinary > desktop systems, using a chroot. > > > I did wonder if qemu could be hacked to allow ssse3 to be intercepted and > > emulated. > > I see no reason why we need such a hack: just make sure a basic x86 is a > supported target. > > Graham > _______________________________________________ > Meego-community mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-community > _______________________________________________ Meego-community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-community
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