I recently performed a rebuild of the Debian archive on ARM64 using some ProLiant m400 servers. While my original goal was to look for compiler errors in GCC 5, the rebuild was a great way to find out the current status of the ARM64 port.
I noticed the following areas where ARM64 support can be improved further. I wanted to send this email so we can coordinate and avoid duplication of effort. 1) Missing dependencies Over 550 packages failed to build on ARM64 due to missing dependencies. Some missing dependencies are libraries or tools that have not been ported to ARM64 yet, but the majority was due to the lack of popular programming languages on ARM64. This includes JavaScript (V8 engine, Node.js), Go (golang-go), .NET (Mono), Common Lisp (sbcl), Haskell (GHC), and Pascal (fp-compiler). I suspect most of these are being ported upstream (possibly with the help of Linaro). Edmund Grimley Evans filed some bugs to track the status in Debian, e.g. Go (#784543): Should be in release 1.5 around July 31 Mono (#789771): Upstream status not clear from the bug V8 (#785696): Done upstream but needs packaging (complicated due to node.js) Free Pascal (#784569): Done upstream 2) Out of date configure scripts During the rebuild, over 160 packages failed to build on ARM64 because of out-of-date autoconf and libtool configure scripts. Most of these bugs have been reported over a year ago by the ARM64 porters (Matthias Klose from Canonical/Ubuntu and Wookey from ARM/Linaro) and the PowerPC porters. These are easy to solve by autoreconfing packages; maybe we should coordinate NMUs at some point. 3) Other packages that require porting work I went through all packages that are not arch: any, but which list specific architectures. I filed wishlist bugs on those that look like they might be useful on ARM64. As a result, some Debian and upstream developers already implemented ARM64 support, and for the rest we now have a TODO list in the BTS. (I have some colleagues at HP who will look into some of these bugs.) During the archive rebuild, I looked up bugs and made sure all existing bugs had the "arm64" usertag. I also added additional tags to make it easier to focus on specific areas: * "autoreconf" where autoconf/libtool updates are necessary http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=autoreconf;[email protected] * "port" where some actual porting work might be necessary https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=port;[email protected] I hope this update is useful. -- Martin Michlmayr Linux for HP Helion, Hewlett-Packard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: https://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
