TC for Raspberry Pi

[bmarkus]

Raspberry Pi will be available soon and I'm sure I'm not the only one who already placed an order. According to its specification it is a good target for TC and also price is reasonable even if it is slighltly above the annoinced $35. Another good point wide availability (hopefully) and the unified platform, no segmentation according to different hardware.

It is the time now to start a project for Raspberry Pi to show that there is a life over the 1.8GByte Debian. I'm ready to participate but it must be a team work. Also would be good to do it officially as part of the TC development (there is already an ARM directory at the ibiblio server )

What is the view of TC Core Development Team and of course other community members?

[curaga]

(there is already an ARM directory at the ibiblio server  )

Where?

[caminati]

Raspberry Pi will be available soon and I'm sure I'm not the only one who already placed an order. According to its specification it is a good target for TC and also price is reasonable even if it is slighltly above the annoinced $35. Another good point wide availability (hopefully) and the unified platform, no segmentation according to different hardware.

It is the time now to start a project for Raspberry Pi to show that there is a life over the 1.8GByte Debian. I'm ready to participate but it must be a team work. Also would be good to do it officially as part of the TC development (there is already an ARM directory at the ibiblio server )

What is the view of TC Core Development Team and of course other community members?

Please count me in, for what I'm worth.
What is happening with Raspberry and collapsing prices on arm SoCs is impressive: also look at Allwinner A10, which is candidate to power devices even more open than Raspberry itself, and maybe cheaper in the long run:

http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/
http://limadriver.org/

The Mele A1000 this morning has been briefly available on aliexpress for 60$:
http://www.mele.cn/en/web/pro_show.aspx?cid=46&pid=60
This makes it an early competitor for Raspberry Pi.

I was pissed off for not getting a RaspberryPi Model B this morning at 7am (by the way, it looks like they will manage to fit 256Mb ram even on the cheaper A model, which mitigates the delusion for having to wait), and so I bought an Allwinner-based tablet at 100euro:
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/506135830-Ainol-Novo7-ELF-android-4-0-tablet-pc-capacitive-IPS-8GB-MID-wholesalers.html

I am willing to do tests on it, or whatever could be useful.
One problem is the lack of backward compatibility between Arm families. I don't know how this is managed on other distros.
Finally: Bmarkus, are you joking about a supposed arm directory living on ibiblio?

[roberts]

Raspberry Pi will be available soon and I'm sure I'm not the only one who already placed an order. According to its specification it is a good target for TC and also price is reasonable even if it is slighltly above the annoinced $35. Another good point wide availability (hopefully) and the unified platform, no segmentation according to different hardware.

It is the time now to start a project for Raspberry Pi to show that there is a life over the 1.8GByte Debian. I'm ready to participate but it must be a team work. Also would be good to do it officially as part of the TC development (there is already an ARM directory at the ibiblio server )

What is the view of TC Core Development Team and of course other community members?

I am certainly interested. At least to prototype, that is, to use their kernel and modules and see how the Core foundation performs. But, I am not 1 in 10,000 that sold out in minutes, and I am in the USA. So when I might actually get one is unknown. Still as time permits there is virtualization for initial evaluation.

BTW There was an arm directory as well as an x64 directory. They were both later removed. So likely you synced your local copy at that time.

[bmarkus]

@Robert

thanks for the answer. Glad to hear that you are interested Right, we can start it in a virtual environment, no need for the hardware in the beginning. Actually there are two LINUX versions announced. One is SENECA collage who demonstrated videos but their FEDORA REMIX is not yet available. Second is CNXsoft, their DEBIAN is available with instruction how to run with QEMU. It is a good starting point, I will set it up in the next days:

http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/02/18/raspberry-pi-releases-1st-sd-card-image-debian-how-to-use-it-in-the-emulator/

@Curaga

Few weeks ago looking for buggy .dep files at ibiblio with ftp I have seen the arm directory which suggested that there is something going or at least planned

@Caminati

Fine, thanks.

[curaga]

I was looking more towards the Allwinner part, considering it takes a dual-core A9 to match a first-gen single-core Atom, the Allwinner A10 is a single-core A8, and the Pi is about three times slower than an A8.

Because of the huge perf. differences, please name the port(s) specifically ("armv5_hf_neon" instead of "arm" for example). Then a port for future chips will be able to take advantage of the extensions in those cpus.

Each chip family still needs a different kernel sadly, and the ARM mem/string optimizations aren't yet merged in eglibc (see cortexstrings at launchpad).

One problem is the lack of backward compatibility between Arm families. I don't know how this is managed on other distros.

They pick one or a few targets, and everything lower is not supported.

[solorin]

If it's possible to cross-compile extensions from tc running on other architectures for this new ARM variant. I'm happy to support the effort by porting extensions.

If this is being developed is it possible that it will run on any one of the varieties of plug computers?

cheerio,
solorin

[gerald_clark]

You also have to decide whether you are going to run big-endian or little-endian.

[roberts]

Now we learn why no Ubuntu in your raspberry pi.
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/raspberry-pi-interview-eban-upton-reveals-all/

[bmarkus]

Thanks for sharing the link. It is a good interview. Not because of UBUNTU but the Raspberry Pi itself. And it is not a PR article created by Liz, Upton's wife.

[cast-fish]

This thread idea sounds very promising...

what on earth is going on in 1.8 gigs of Debian?....when TCL is 12 megabytes?....it's perplexing to say the very least.

I think Debian at it's very basic form is 180 megs....which is still 20 times larger than TCL and that's without any GUI. Maybe Debian with a GUI is infact 30 to 50 times larger than TCL.  (or something)

This is just a broad comment about the size of operating systems. Why are these OS's so humongous and large? when TCL clearly proves what can be achieved in so much less space.

It is most likely requiring great knowledge and skill for you to convert TCL over to ARM 5....but it seems that the Pi is the perfect environment for it. Angstrom Linux may weigh in pretty small for the Pi...

Vince.

[curaga]

So Ubuntu chose ARMv7 as the current minimum. Can't really blame them, it would either have been double the work to do two builds, or having a single v6 build would have been several times slower on v7 hardware than something optimized for v7.

[bmarkus]

Local Farnell distributor just informed, that due to the decision made by Farnell they are not authorized to sell Raspberry Pi therefore they are cancelling my order. Friends placed order at Farnell UK got 58 days delivery time. Now I'm cancelling my Raspberry Pi project and will restart few other pending developments. Still I would be happy to see a TC ported. BTW, now Arch Linus is also available fo Raspberry Pi.

[roberts]

Sorry to hear this. I thought you were in the lucky 10,000. The handling of orders has been a real problem with much misunderstandings. I remain an interested party in waiting.

[bmarkus]

Farnell UK now collects registrations for Raspberry Pi only, so I expect availability for June. So it is out of my interest even if I put registration. I have several unfinished projects here so it is good not to start another even if it is exciting just to finish one of them, hopefully. No Linux, pure C on dsPIC32 and a HAM radio APRS communication server and gatway in Python already running on Linux, WIN and ASUS router/Routerboard with OpenWRT.