Fedora 18 arrives for ARM

Fedora 18 was published a month ago and now it is available in versions for the ARM architectures known as ARMv5tel and ARMv7hl in the Linux space. The Fedora Project is providing pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3).

An image for the Raspberry Pi is not being offered by the project because proper hardware support is dependent on software that, according the the Fedora criteria, is considered non-free and therefore cannot be included in the distribution. The Fedora Project ARM porters are cooperating closely though with the Seneca College in Toronto which is working on a Fedora Remix, based on Fedora 18 for ARM, that will include the restricted drivers.

This makes Fedora 18 available on eight architectures in all. Since its release, which included the two versions for x86 processors, there have also been ports of Fedora 18 on Power processors (PPC and PPC64) and System Z (s390 and s390x).

From Fedora 19 onwards, the ARM port will assume that processors will have hardware floating point support. Fedora 18 for ARM will, therefore, be the last release with support for softfp (software floating point). The Seneca College will also, in future, be taking care of the version for the Raspberry Pi. The Fedora developers are also working out how to offer, in the medium term, a version for the 64-bit ARM processors (ARMv8 with AArch64 instruction set).

(djwm)