From Fedora Project Wiki

Revision as of 22:05, 17 January 2011 by Jankratochvil (talk | contribs) (+screenshot etc.)

Biarch Spin

Summary

Provide both 64bit (preferred) and 32bit distribution for PCs on a single media.

Owner(s)

Detailed Description

Automatically prefer x86_64 (AKA amd64, Intel 64, EM64T) live boot and installation but still provide i686 (AKA Intel 32) live boot and installation for 32bit only PCs and/or recovery of 32bit installations.

Most installations can benefit from x86_64 ABI increased performance and wider data management capabilities. Still many installations are done in 32bit as people are not aware whether they have 64bit capable hardware. The installation can autodetect the best installation mode for their system.

Software developers can benefit from easier addressing modes. Users can benefit from a single kernel variant (no longer need for PAE and/or regular kernel variants).

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora can automatically provide the best suitable variant of the distribution for each user. User experience gets greatly improved.

Builder + Kickstart File

* http://www.jankratochvil.net/priv/f15-live.sh
* http://www.jankratochvil.net/priv/f15-live.ks

ISO Name / FS Label

The shell script creates files in this order:

* f15-live-x86_64.iso
* f15-live-i686.iso
* f15-live.bin

If both .iso files already exist the f15-live.ks file is not used at all. f15-live.bin is a 2GB image suitable for flash disk (like /dev/sdX where X is for example d, CHECK THE MEDIA NAME IN YOUR CASE). You should never use the partition names (like /dev/sdX1). Example command is:

cat f15-live.bin >/dev/sdX

As the biarch image is provided as a flash disk image including partition table for one 2GB FAT partition the ISO label is not applicable. FAT image has label LIVE, both ext3fs.img files have label _f14-live. The images get found by UUID such as: root=live:UUID=7404-2829

Dependencies

No special dependencies are known.

Scope / Testing

The provided .ks file is not essential for this Spin, the .ks' file can be dropped. Just the default CD size times 2 is not much useful as the nearest higher available flash disks are 2GB. Therefore I have provided some additional packages in the supplied .ks file. I changed there some personal boot defaults but those can be either also dropped or imported to the system .ks files.

One should test it both with x86_64 hardware CPU (equivalent to qemu-kvm -cpu qemu64) and also with i686 hardware CPU (qemu-kvm -cpu qemu32) to verify ifcpu64.c32 boots the right distro variant. Real iron can be also used.

Spins Page

TBD.

Slogan

Automatic 64bit/32bit installation and recovery.

Spin description

Provide both 64bit (preferred) and 32bit distribution for PCs on a single media.

Screenshot

Download tab

https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/c/ce/Spin-details-download.png

Support tab

Users can contact jan.kratochvil@redhat.com although there is no specific code besides ifcpu64.c32 from the project syslinux.

Custom branding

None used.

Comments and Discussion