Ubuntu Wiki

Fresh Ideas for Oneric on Arm

Whiteboard for brainstorming about ARM specific Oneric blueprints

If you've an idea, please add it. If you have comments, please put them beneath the idea.

ogra brainstorm

(not all of the below will be valid as spec, this is just a brain dump)

• Develop proper ship mechanism for shipping non-installed packages on preinstalled images (i.e. pre-populate apt-cache) for langpacks, server packages, etc
• ARM thin clients (c/o from natty)
• Work out and publish a proper documentation people can follow to get unsupported community builds for their ARM HW (which packages/code needs to be touched, which people to connect to to get changes merged etc).
• re-vive netinstall images. for server installations (requires implementation of partman reciepes we dont have atm)
• public arm PPAs (c/o from natty, inspect the possibility to use usb booting instead of addon board and SD card)
• participate in debians/linaros ongoing flash-kernel rewrite to make sure our requirements are met too

• redesign the way to trigger flash-kernel in linux postinst (see bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/701698) according to upstream the armel linux packages need to handle initramfs and bootloader config updates through the kernel packages, not through flash-kernel calls in update-initramfs

• raw boot partition, use a non filesystem partition to hold bootloader and kernel on the SD instead of vfat

GrueMaster brainstorm

• develop method for using a hwpack overlay to base images for specific platform support (i.e. Nokia n900, blaze, etc).
• btrfs support for rootfs. May require jasper-growroot to convert after resize.

rsalveti brainstorm

• make sure tftp is enable at u-boot and also support additional boot methods (musb?). That with netinstall images can work without using any sd cards.
• check if the gl/gles proxy library can be used, so we don't need to change everything to be gles at ARM (soon it'll be possible to have gl hardware on arm too)

jani ideas

• SD image performance improvements - align to 4Mb, consider Btrfs
• have a good Adobe Flash player available (test and improve lightspark for ARM)

• evaluate providing LibreOffice on the image considering that ARM hw gets faster and LibO gets leaner.

• improve QA FTBFS page/ general FTBFS tracking workflow to be more useful for ARM team
• see if/how booting time from power on to usable desktop can be improved on the default SD images