Allwinner sunxi (A10 / A13 / A20) ARM SoC support

Summary

Allwinner A10 / A13 / A20 SoCs are used in a number of popular low cost arm development boards and arm mini computers. Currently Fedora ARM is supported on these devices through a Remix. Allwinner kernel support is progressing rapidly upstream, and with this upstream kernel support it should be possible to support Allwinner SoCs in the official Fedora ARM images, without the need for a remix.

Owner

Name: Hans de Goede
Email: hdegoede@redhat.com
Name: Peter Robinson
Email: pbrobinson@fedoraproject.org
Release notes owner:

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 21
Last updated: December 25th 2013
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

The linux-sunxi community is currently working hard to get Allwinner SoCs supported in the upstream kernel. A big part of this should land in the 3.14 kernel. The plan is to support Allwinner SoCs in headless mode for now, and carry patches for mmc, ahci and usb support for 1-2 kernel releases (until they land upstream).

Benefit to Fedora

Out of the box support for very popular and low cost arm development boards and devices. For example the cubietruck has been chosen by the virt-team as the device to get for people who want to test hardware virtualization on ARM.

Scope

Supporting Allwinnner SoCs ootb will require kernel and u-boot support. Kernel support is landing upstream and we will add patches to the Fedora kernel for 1-2 kernel releases to supplement this. u-boot support currently lives in a u-boot fork upstream, this fork is tracking / merging u-boot upstream and does intent to get sunxi support merged into the official u-boot packages, but there is no timeline for this atm. For u-boot we will create a separate u-boot-sunxi package, which can be dropped once u-boot support has been merged into u-boot upstream.

Proposal owners:

Will try to get as much kernel support upstream as possible, supplement with patches in the Fedora kernel package. Will create a u-boot-sunxi package with sunxi specific u-boot. Will look into adding a config tool to the sdcard images to easily select and install the correct u-boot and dtb, like the Allwinner Remix images have.

Other developers: N/A

Release engineering: N/A

Policies and guidelines: N/A

Upgrade/compatibility impact

This should not need any special handling in the upgrade path.

How To Test

1) Download Fedora-21 ARM sdcard image 2) Run tool to install the correct u-boot and dtb on the sdcard 3) Boot from sdcard, should have a working serial console, network, mmc, ahci and usb.

User Experience

The user will be able to use F-21 on Allwinner SoCs ootb, including using hardware virtualization on A20 devices ootb.

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

Contingency mechanism: If we fail to get the necessary changes in place F-21 ARM will ship without Allwinner SoC support
Contingency deadline: Beta freeze
Blocks release? No

Documentation

TODO

Release Notes