[Sugar-devel] Raspberry Pi and Sugar

[Ian MacArthur]

On 17 Mar 2013, at 10:05, Aleksey Lim wrote:

> I've CCed sugar-devel@ because I'm not well informed about current ARM
> related efforts. Since XO-1.75 is ARM based, all needed patches should
> be already landed to upstream sugar (maybe not in 0.94 wich is the last
> release in Sweets). So, recent sugars should work in Debian on ARM from
> official packages.


Word of caution here though: I'm a Big Fan of the R-Pi, it's a nice bit of kit, but we need to be aware that it is ARMv6 based, and that the Raspbian images are compiled for armhf rather than for armel.

The major distros (including Debian and Ubuntu) tend to be focussing their Arm porting efforts on ARMv7 and later, and for "older" Arm variants they tend to ship the slower (but more widely supported) armel target option...

So, in summary, porting work to get code running on Arm in Debian does not always ensure that it will work on the R-Pi without further "tweaks". Usually. But not Always...

Mike.T and Plugwash (who built Raspbian) did a mountain of work porting Debian's ARMv7 codebase to ARMv6, we should not underestimate the effort they made, and need to be at least aware that any code *might* next extra "attention" for ARMv6 with armhf targets.

That said, Python code ought to Just Work of course!