[Sugar-devel] Does anyone have kernel development experience?

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

In thread "The future of Sugar on XO-1s" on 7 June 2016 at 19:58,
<sam at sam.today> wrote:

> On 29 May 2016 at 22:02, Sam P. <sam at sam.today> wrote:
>>> Supporting XO1s is more than just performance though.
>>> XOs don't run normal, up to date versions of fedora.
>>
>> Why is this?
>
> Well, the XO1.75 and XO4 are arm.  And aren't all ARM devices special
> snowflakes that need more kernel patches than even Ubuntu would slap on Gtk?

I think you are totally correct.

It seems many ARM devices are not like PCs - I saw a poster expressing
surprise that a Pi3 could be booted from the same SD card that boots a
Pi1...

>From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Kernel it seems that the XO kernels -
there are 3! For XO-1/XO-1.5, for XO-1.75, and for XO-4, ay ay ay -
are maintained forks of old kernel versions.

No XO can run newer releases of Fedora because Fedora now depends on
things only available in newer kernel versions.

There is a list of problems with booting an XO-1/XO-1.5 from v4.7-rc1
at http://dev.laptop.org/git/olpc-kernel/commit/?h=olpc-4.7

I assume that XO-1.75 and XO-4 can't be booted at all, being 'special
snowflakes' as you put it.

So... I propose there are 3 ways forward:

1. Target the most-recent old version of Fedora that OLPC-OS uses,
which sadly means targeting the older version of GTK that is packaged
for that Fedora release.

2. Update the 3 XO kernels against latest upstream, so they can run
Fedora 24 and the latest Sugar dependencies

3. Package the latest versions of Sugar's dependencies (GTK,
telepathy, etc) for the old version Fedora used by OLPC-OS.

I think (3) is not worthwhile, and (2) requires someone with kernel
development skills.

Does anyone have kernel development experience?

-- 
Cheers
Dave