Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I just stumbled across this joint press release by ARM and Canonical:

http://www.arm.com/news/23761.html

So it looks like there will be an officially supported ARM version of Ubuntu as soon the next release (April 2009). Big news for the next IT as well as Maemo. Interesting times!

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

This is so cool.
I have already tried mojo, but... ..This is going to be offical port.
New releases for ARM will be available at the same time they will be for x85!
I believe there is gonna be a lot more stuff, and architecture will be called "armel" instead of Mojos stupid arm choise. :)
Here is arcticle about it on ubuntu wiki:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MobileAndEmbedded/ARM-EL-port

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

This sounds like we're out of luck with the current tablets. Our processors are only ARMv6, right?

EDIT: The wiki seems to agree with me about the Nokia-sponsored mojo port:
That wiki page doesn't feel like it's about the same thing as today's announcement... It hasn't been edited in three months...

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Someone took the time to post this in Slashdot, go ahead and promote NITs on Slashdot.

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl...8/11/13/186217

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Promote what about the tablets? We're not even sure this will run on the current tablets.

EDIT: Unfortunately, this is much more of a promotion opportunity for Pandora, as they have the required processor.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Whoa! Somebody say "Pandora" outloud? Now I'm listening! ;)

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

/me braces self for Karel's arrival.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Heads up Deblet, Tabuntu is right around the corner!!! :D

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Sorry, what?

Do you guys know something I don't?

Can software compiled for ARMv7 be run on an ARMv6? Have they announced an ARMv6 port?

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Could you be more specific? I know lots of things you don't ;)

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Yes, penguinbait, you do. Lots of things. Including what that black stuff on the end of your avatar's finger is.

As for "more specific," please see the sentences that you deleted from the quote in your message ;)

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

What do you know about native Texas plants?

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

With my tablet on wi-fi and a few stylus taps, I know everything wikipedia knows.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I could tell you, but then I would have to drive to Canada and kill you.. Its best left un-discussed. :cool:

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Normally, I wouldn't be too worried. You're American. Even though you've got lots of guns n' stuff, most Americans don't know where Canada is, exactly :p

But you seem much smarter than the average American, and you do know a lot of things I don't know... But even that doesn't guarantee a whole lot; Obama was heard to say that he was going to talk to the Canadian president about NAFTA.

Our what now?

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Uh, um, oh, he meant your Queen ;)

And I am from Michigan, I have a tunnel, bridges, or I can take my boat. I know where Canada is :eek::eek:

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

If you canuckleheads need a president, we have one for you real cheap.

He'll be in Crawford, TX next January... unemployed.

Let's talk.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Panguinbait's profile:

computer geek and part-time asassin for the CIA.


:D

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Isn't Alaska in Canada? If Not will you take it back so we can be sure Palin never runs for another National office again?

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

OK, We'll take it, but you're going to have to take a whole lot of francopop chanteuses in return. I hope Vegas is big enough for a another half-gross of Celine Dions...

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Why don't we trade Quebec for Alaska? Heheheh...

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Ok, back to the ARMv6 vs v7a issue. I'm not sure what all these press releases about 'porting Ubuntu to ARMv7' is really about. I don't know a single Ubuntu (or Debian or any other distro) application which relies much on assembly. They're all written in C, or C++, or occasionally some other high level language.

So, what all of those applications rely on in order to get good performance out of a particular CPU is just this single question: "Did somebody add support for ARM v7a optimizations to GCC already?". If yes, then you can choose to optimize for your architecture of choice by using a particular compiler flag. And potentially make the executable incompatible with older (e.g. ARM v6) architectures.

The real porting to a new architecture goes on in A) the compiler suite, as mentioned above, and B) in the kernel. Not in the distro. Ubuntu is a distro. The kernel porting is done by all those folks (including Nokia, and other companies) contributing to the kernel in general, and linux-omap in particular (for our omap-based ARM devices).

So what does it mean when they say "porting Ubuntu to ARM"? It doesn't make sense. "Ubuntu contributing to ARM Linux kernel development", or "Ubuntu supporting work on the GNU Compiler Collection" would make some sense. "porting Ubunto to ARMv7" does not.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I think it mostly has to do with people thinking compiling something for ARM automatically makes it a mobile distro. See Deblet—it doesn't.

The conclusions being draw here are really somewhat outlandish for a new CPU target announcement. . . . :\

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Well, there's the issue that a lot of applications (e.g. iceweasel) used to be broken on ARM, presumably due to alignment and/or type size issues (but IDK). Fixing that is legitimate app-level porting. Of course, now that Debian has them working for ARMv4 (I think?), tweak compile settings and everything's likely to work straight off on ARMv6. (Don't get me wrong, even just building everything optimized for a higher CPU, with no contributions to gcc, and putting it all in a repository so you can rootstrap up to a full, more-optimized, system is certainly good work, but it does seem a little over-hyped if that's all that's going on...)

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Just noticed http://blog.canonical.com/?p=74 - "For now, builds will expect a minimum of an ARMv5 instruction set". Interesting.

Just to clarify especulations, this is not a covered approach of Ubuntu to Maemo. ARM and Ubuntu have probably good reasons to sign such agreement without needing to put Maemo in the equation. Of course the fact that Ubuntu goes ARM puts it closer to Maemo but that's it.

Note also that the announcement actually talks about "Full Ubuntu Desktop Experience" while "Ubuntu Mobile" is not mentioned. Probably for a reason?

As a note aside, personally I'm looking forward to the outcome of this announcement also for some reasons that hopefully will make our life easier: the ARM stakeholders getting more and more sensitive about open source and the Ubuntu fans learning more and more about why direct comparisons between ARM/mobile and x86/PC are not always applicable.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Arm targeting the netbook market probably:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/13/a...ook-mid-chips/

Edit: but surely you already knew that

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I have to say I'm still more excited about a handheld device using ARM Cortex A8 than a netbook one. Although a netbook with "all-day battery life" will revolutionize the laptop industry as much as, if not more than, the original EeePC did.

EDIT: I'm also glad to see a big, serious effort to port the Ubuntu repositories to ARM, not the small scale, experimental effort of the Mojo team. I'm also really glad to see that they're targeting ARMv5+, which means we're in on the fun!

As I noted in the Mojo Ubuntu thread, once you step away from the hardware support and user experience of the x86 desktop / laptop, and look at the variety of software in the repositories, Ubuntu doesn't have a lot to differentiate itself from Debian Sid at the moment. I suspect they're going to focus on getting this ARM port to be as smooth and simple to install as it is on the x86 desktop, with lots pretty install wizards and good hardware support. That's been their strategy on the desktop, and it's worked to make them really stand out.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I'm also looking forward to seeing the results. The process interests me just as much as the results. Will they make a flexible system that tries to abstract away the details of a whole range of ARM systems? Will they target popular released systems with custom releases? Or has ARM contracted them to support specific unreleased machines? Any way you look at it, 2009 should be an interesting year for mobile Linux. :D

-John

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

A link to my blogpost to clarify things a little bit: http://idlethread.blogspot.com/2008/...on-arm_14.html

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I think this was not posted yet:
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/arm-linux
They are talking a lot about targeting to armv7

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I've installed Ubuntu armel, and now I'm installing the Ubuntu versions of OpenOffice.org and Firefox. Details at 11...or whenever the 780+MB finish downloading and installing ;)

EDIT: repository at ports.ubuntu.com

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Wait a sec, do you mean I can install the armel build of Ubuntu on my n810 right now?

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Of course, i have been playing with it 3 weeks already!

Gnome is very slow, when booting directly in the ubuntu... There are still many packages missing and we have to wait a long time before they finish armv6 (the release now it for armv5)

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Hm. That's surprising. The Ubuntu OpenOffice doesn't seem any faster than in Debian, even though it is supposedly targeting the Arm v5 instruction set (as opposed to Debian targeting the v4 instruction set). Guess the optimizations are either not being used or they aren't that significant.

The OpenOffice splash screen and the Matchbox Keyboard are different looking, however.

A couple of screen shots:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3001/...e53a2277_o.png

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3042/...24d584c9_o.png

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

AFAIK, the gcc optimizations for armv4t vs armv5te vs armv6 are not all that big of a performance gain. Apparently the big speedup to be had (at the cost of larger binaries) is enabling VFP support. [1] And, IIRC, this isn't done yet.

-John

[1] http://syslog.movial.fi/archives/46-...ot-to-VFP.html

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Just FYI, lxde and MID packages are now available.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

so can we or can we not install ubuntu on the n810?

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

We can! :)

There is also a really great project going on that will make us able to use maemo packages on it! (I know that's not the point :D)
http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer_Blueprint_New
http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer_Blueprint

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

armv5te, armv6 or armv7 are most useful when having hand crafted optimizations for these instruction sets. The difference can be very significant, especially for multimedia. But the compiler itself is very dumb and can't generate fast code (at least this is true for gcc).

Some part of this speedup apparently comes from just not using thumb, the other part comes from using vfp. There is no penalty for switching arm/thumb modes, this is done at function call or return boundaries (you can call thumb functions from normal arm code, and arm code can be called from thumb). This switching does not have any overhead at all when compared to normal arm->arm functions calls.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Would there be any interest in Easy Ubuntu? I notice that the version of OpenJava 6 is more advanced than in Debian, and there's some interesting new packages in Ubuntu like Prism that aren't in Debian. It wouldn't be very difficult for me to pop an optimized rootfs into an image file and put it on my server...

EDIT: And this stuff too...

EDIT2: Hey, I bumped into an old friend while over there. Also, I wonder if this would work on our desktop?

Has anyone gotten the full Ubuntu Mobile desktop working on a tablet via this distribution? Is it much heavier than LXDE?