Marcin Juszkiewicz - openembedded

Twenty years of OpenEmbedded membership

2024-05-01T10:52:00+02:00

There are memberships I forgot about. Some of them remind from time to time with “we have changed rules” mail. Which usually are moments when I remove account from their system.

And there are memberships I remember never mind if I use them on not anymore.

One of them is OpenEmbedded.

History

I started using OpenEmbedded around February/March of 2004. Will not cover history here as I wrote several posts closer to those years:

Year with OpenEmbedded in 2005
30 months of OpenEmbedded and me in 2006
3 years of OpenEmbedded and me in 2007
5 years with OpenEmbedded in 2009
10 years ago I got write access to OpenEmbedded in 2014

I learnt a lot, helped people and companies, got paid by both people and companies, mentored new users and developers.

And got some friends in the OpenEmbedded community.

Membership

In 2007 we were discussing about creating official organization. During FOSDEM 2008 a group of developers met and it happened.

First it was OpenEmbedded e.V. based on Germany law, years later it became one of Software in the Public Interest (SPI) projects.

Developers joined, became members, attended meetings to vote etc..

During years, due to member being spread all over the globe, we moved from in-person meetings (with potential proxies) to online voting system.

And in last week I got an email with voting invitation. Of course, I knew that it will come — we have openembedded-members mailing list for a reason ;D

Sentimental value

For me, my OpenEmbedded membership has highest value when it comes to my memberships. Sure, mostly for sentimental values but when I am at FOSDEM, I always visit OpenEmbedded stand, usually attend some OE related talk in the Embedded devroom etc.. Similar at other events.

And my e-mail address in the openembedded.org domain still works. I do not use it but it has value to me.

My twenty plus years of IRC

2021-05-20T10:31:00+02:00

In 1996 I started studies at Białystok University of Technology. And one of early days I found that corridor with text terminals. Some time later I joined that crowd and started using HP-2623A term with SunOS account.

And one of first applications crowd shown me was ircII (other were bash, screen, pine and ncftp). So I am IRC user for over 24 years now and this XKCD comics can be about me:

Team chat

Clients

As wrote above I started with ircII. It was painful to use so quickly some scripts landed — Venom, Lice and some others. Tried Epic, Epic2000 and some other clients to finally end with Irssi. I have never been a fan of GUI based ones.

There were moments when people used CTCP VERSION to check what clients other users use. In old Amiga days I usually had it set to similar one as AmIRC one but with version bumped above whatever was released. Simple trolling for all those curious people. Nowadays it simply replies with “telnet” and there was a day when I logged to IRC server and exchanged some messages using just telnet :D

Networks

For years I was user of IRCnet. It was popular in Poland so why bother with checking other networks. But as time passed and I became more involved in FOSS projects there was a need to start using Freenode, then OFTC, Mozilla etc.

Checked how old my accounts are as it nicely show when I started using which network.

IRCnet

IRCnet was my first IRC network. Stopped using it few years ago as all channels I was on went quiet or migrated elsewhere (mostly Freenode).

For years I was visible on Amiga channels #amisia, #amigapl where I met several friends and I am in contact with many of them still.

Freenode

The journey started on 15th May 2004. This was time when I started playing with OpenEmbedded and knew that this is a project where I will spend some of my free time (it became hobby, then job).

It was a place where CentOS, Fedora, Linaro, OpenStack and several other projects were present.

NickServ- Information on Hrw (account hrw):
NickServ- Registered : Mar 15 10:59:47 2004 (17y 9w 6d ago)
NickServ- Last addr  : ~hrw@redhat/hrw
NickServ- vHost      : redhat/hrw
NickServ- Last seen  : now
NickServ- Flags      : HideMail
NickServ- *** End of Info ***

OFTC

For me OFTC means Debian. Later also virtualization stuff as QEMU and libvirt folks sit there.

NickServ- Nickname information for hrw (Marcin Juszkiewicz)
NickServ- hrw is currently online
NickServ-   Time registered: Fri 10 Jun 2011 17:43:55 +0000 (9y 11m 10d 14:47:05 ago)
NickServ- Account last quit: Tue 18 May 2021 09:07:55 +0000 (1d 23:23:05 ago)
NickServ- Last quit message: Remote host closed the connection
NickServ-         Last host: 00019652.user.oftc.net
NickServ-               URL: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/
NickServ-      Cloak string: Not set
NickServ-          Language: English (0)
NickServ-           ENFORCE: ON
NickServ-            SECURE: OFF
NickServ-           PRIVATE: ON
NickServ-             CLOAK: ON
NickServ-          VERIFIED: YES

Libera

And since yesterday I am on Libera as well.

NickServ- Information on hrw (account hrw):
NickServ- Registered : May 19 15:26:18 2021 +0000 (17h 32m 35s ago)
NickServ- Last seen  : now
NickServ- Flags      : HideMail, Private
NickServ- *** End of Info ***

What next?

I saw and used several instant messaging platforms. All of them were younger than IRC. Many of them are no longer popular, several are no longer existing. IRC survived so I continue to use it.

8 years of my work on AArch64

2020-09-23T17:33:00+02:00

Back in 2012 AArch64 was something new, unknown yet. There was no toolchain support (so no gcc, binutils or glibc). And I got assigned to get some stuff running around it.

OpenEmbedded

As there was no hardware cross compilation was the only way. Which meant OpenEmbedded as we wanted to have wide selection of software available.

I learnt how to use modern OE (with OE Core and layers) by building images for ARMv7 and checking them on some boards I had floating around my desk.

Non-public toolchain work

Some time later first non-public patches for binutils and gcc arrived in my inbox. Then eglibc ones. So I started building and on 12th September 2012 I was able to build helloworld:

12:38 hrw@puchatek:aarch64-oe-linux$ ./aarch64-oe-linux-gcc ~/devel/sources/hello.c -o hello
12:38 hrw@puchatek:aarch64-oe-linux$ file hello
hello: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.39, not stripped
12:39 hrw@puchatek:aarch64-oe-linux$ objdump -f hello

hello:     file format elf64-littleaarch64
architecture: aarch64, flags 0x00000112: 
EXEC_P, HAS_SYMS, D_PAGED 
start address 0x00000000004003e0

Then images followed. Several people at Linaro (and outside) used those images to test misc things.

At that moment we ran ARMv8 Fast models (quite slow system emulator from Arm). There was a joke that Arm developers formed a queue for single core 10 GHz x86-64 cpus to get AArch64 running faster.

Toolchain became public

Then 1st October 2012 came. I entered Linaro office in Cambridge for AArch64 meeting and was greeted with “glibc patches went to public ML” information. So I rebased my OpenEmbedded repository, updated patches, removed any traces of non-public ones and published whole work.

Building on AArch64

My work above added support for AArch64 as a target architecture. But can it be used as a host? One day I decided to check and ran OpenEmbedded on AArch64.

After one small patch it worked fine.

X11 anyone?

As I had access to Arm Fast model I was able to play with graphics. So one day in January 2013 I did a build and and started Xorg. Through next years I had fun when people wrote that they got X11 running on their AArch64 devices ;D

Two years later I had Applied Micro Mustang at home (still have it). Once it had working PCI Express support I added graphics card and started X11 on hardware.

Then went debugging why Xorg requires configuration file and one day with help from Dave Airlie, Mark Salter and Matthew Garrett I got two solutions for the problem. Do not remember did any of them went upstream but some time later problem was solved.

Few years later I met Dave Airlie at Linux Plumbers. We introduced to each other and he said “ah, you are the ‘arm64 + radeon guy’” ;D

AArch64 Desktop week

One day in September 2015 I had an idea. PCIe worked, USB too. So I did AArch64 desktop week. Connected monitors, keyboard, mouse, speakers and used Mustang instead of my x86-64 desktop.

It was fun.

Distributions

First we had nothing. Then I added AArch64 target into OpenEmbedded.

Same month Arm released Foundation model so anyone was able to play with AArch64 system. No screen, just storage, serial and network but it was enough for some to even start building whole distributions like Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu.

At that moment several patches were shared by all distributions as it was faster way than waiting for upstreams. I saw multiple versions of some of them during my journey of fixing packages in some distributions.

Debian and Ubuntu

In February 2013 Debian/Ubuntu team presented their AArch64 port. It was their first architecture bootstrapped without using external toolchains. Work was done in Ubuntu due to different approach to development than Debian has. All work was merged back so some time later Debian also had AArch64 port.

Fedora

Fedora team started early — October 2012, right after toolchain became public. Used Fedora 17 packages and switched to Fedora 19 during work.

When I joined Red Hat in September 2013 one of my duties was fixing packages in Fedora to get them built on AArch64.

OpenSUSE

In January 2014 first versions of QEMU support arrived and people moved from using Foundation model. March/April OpenSUSE team did massive amount of builds to get their distribution built that way.

RHEL

Fedora bootstrap also meant RHEL 7 bootstrap. When I joined Red Hat there were images ready to use in models. My work was testing them and fixing packages. There were multiple times when AArch64 fix helped to build also on ppc64le and s390x architectures.

Hardware I played with

First Linux capable hardware was announced in June 2013. I got access to it at Red Hat. Building and debugging was much faster than using fast models ;D

Applied Micro Mustang

Soon Applied Micro Mustangs were everywhere. Distributions used them to build packages etc. Even without support for half of hardware (no PCI Express, no USB).

I got one in June 2014. Running UEFI firmware out of the box. At first months I had a feeling that firmware is developed at Red Hat as we had fresh versions often right after first patches for missing hardware functionality were written. In reality it was maintained by Applied Micro and we had access to sources so there were some internal changes in testing (that’s why I had firmware versions like ‘0.12-rh’).

All those graphics cards I collected to test how PCI Express works. Or testing USB before it was even merged into Linux mainline kernel. Using virtualization for development of armhf build fixes (8 cores, 12 gigabytes of ram and plenty of storage beat all armv7 hardware I had).

I stopped using Mustang around 2018. It is still under my desk.

For those who use: make sure you have 3.06.25 firmware.

96boards

In February 2015 Linaro announced 96boards initiative. The plan was to make small, unified SBC with different Arm chips. Both 32- and 64-bit ones.

First ones were ‘Consumer Edition’. Small, limited to basic connectivity. Now there are tens of them. 32-bit, 64-bit, fpga etc. Choose your poison ;D

Second ones were ‘Enterprise Edition’. Few attempts existed, most of them did not survived prototype phase. There was joke that full length PCI Express slot and two USB ports requirements are there because I wanted to have AArch64 desktop ;D

Too bad that nothing worth using came from EE spec.

Servers

As Linaro assignee I have access to several servers from Linaro members. Some are mass-market ones, some never made to market. We had over hundred X-Gene1 based systems (mostly as m400 cartridges in HPe Moonshot chassis’) and shutdown them in 2018 as they were getting more and more obsolete.

Main system I use for development is one of those ‘never went to mass-market’ ones. 46 cpu cores, 96 GB of ram make it nice machine for building container images, Debian packages or running virtual machines in OpenStack.

Desktop

For some time I was waiting for some desktop class hardware to have development box more up-to-date than Mustang. Months turned into years. I no longer wait as it looks like there will be no such thing.

Solidrun has made some attempts in this area. First with Macchiatobin and later with Honeycomb. I did not used any of them.

Cloud

When I (re)joined Linaro in 2016 I became part of team working on getting OpenStack working on AArch64 hardware. We used Liberty, Mitaka, Newton releases and then changed way we work and started contributing more. And more. Kolla, Nova, Dib and other projects. Added aarch64 nodes to OpenDev CI.

The effect of it was Linaro Developer Cloud used by hundreds of projects to speed-up their aarch64 porting, tens of projects hosting their CI systems etc.

Two years later Amazon started offering aarch64 nodes in AWS.

Summary

I spent half of my life with Arm on AArch64. Had great moments like building helloworld as one of first people outside of Arm Ltd. Got involved in far more projects then ever thought. Met new friends, visited several places in the world I would probably never go otherwise.

I also got grumpy and complained far too many times that AArch64 market is ‘cheap but limited sbc or fast but expensive servers and nearly nothing in between’. Wrote some posts about missing systems targeting software developers and lost hope that such will happen.

NOTE: It is 8 years of my work on AArch64. I work with Arm since 2004.

My whole career is built on FOSS

2020-02-11T12:30:00+01:00

Some time ago at one of Red Hat mailing lists someone asked “how has open source helped your career”. There were several interesting stories. I had mine as well.

2000

My first contribution to FOSS. It was updating Debian ‘potato’ installation guide for Amiga/m68k. I was writing article to new Amiga magazine called ‘eXec’ about installing Debian. So why not update official instruction at same time?

2002

Probably my first code contribution: small change to MPlayer. I completely forgot about it but as project was changing it’s license in 2017 I got an email about it.

2004

I bought my 3rd PDA (Sharp Zaurus SL-5500) and it was running Linux. I started building apps for it, hacking system to run better. Then cooperated with OpenZaurus distro developers and started contributing to OpenEmbedded build system. One day they gave me write access to repo and told to merge my changes.

When I stopped using OE few years later I was the 5th on list of top contributors.

I also count this year as first one of my FOSS career.

2005

Richard Jackson donated Zaurus c760 to me. As a gift for my OpenZaurus work. And then OPIE 1.2.2 release came due to my changes to make better use of VGA screen. I still have this device in running condition.

2006

Became release manager of OpenZaurus distribution, with team of users testing pre-release images. Released 3.5.4 (and later 3.5.4.1 and 3.5.4.2-rc) version.

Started my own consulting company. Got some serious customers. End of work as PHP programmer.

2007 - 2010

I am doing what was hobby as full time job. Full FOSS work. Different companies, ARM architecture for 95% of time. Mostly consulting around OpenEmbedded.

2010

Due to my ARM foss involvement Canonical hired me. Started working at Linaro as software engineer. Cleaned cross compilers in Ubuntu/Debian, several other things.

2012

Became one of first AArch64 developers. Published OpenEmbedded support for it right after all toolchain patches became public.

2013

Left Linaro and Canonical, wrote about it on blog and in less then hour got “send me your CV” from Jon Masters from Red Hat. Joined company, did lot of changes in RHEL 7 and Fedora — mostly fixing FTBFS on !x86 architectures.

2016

My manager asked me do I want to go back to Linaro. This time as Red Hat assignee. Went, met old chaps, working mostly around OpenStack. Still on 64bit Arm.

2017 - 2020

Lot of work in OpenStack. Some work on Big Data stuff for other team at Linaro. Countless projects where I worked on getting stuff working on AArch64.

Summary

My whole career is built on FOSS.

My x86(-64) desktop runs GNU/Linux since day one (September 2000) as main system. There was OpenDOS as second during studies due to some stuff.

I had MS Windows XP as second system on one of laptops. But that’s due to some Arm hardware bringup tool being available only for this OS (later also for Linux). My family and friends learnt that I am unable to help them with MS Windows issues as I do not know that OS.

FOSDEM 2020

2020-02-04T12:53:00+01:00

FOSDEM. In my opinion the best IT conference. Each year. And I was there for 12th time.

Insane amount of talks (893 this time) allows to choose more than it is possible to see. Which is good because with thousands of attendees it is often impossible to enter the room. Having some headphones helps as everything is live streamed so later there are videos to download (mostly after conference as they go through review process).

Friday

Woke up at 3:45, shower, breakfast, taxi at 4:30, bus at 5:00, plane at 8:40 (TXL -> BRU). Met a friend at the bus, watched 2nd episode of “Star Trek: Picard” and tried to conserve energy for the rest of a day.

Landed, took a train to Brussels Nord, added some tickets to MOBIB card and went to CentOS Dojo as usual on FOSDEM’s Friday.

Cloud SIG talk turned into discussion how many projects are waiting for their packages. Thorsten’s talk about CentOS on desktop had some interesting points — you install once and use to the death of hardware. Then went to talk about Software Collections. It was Jan’s first presentation ever and went quite ok.

Skipped armhfp talk and went for some food. And then hours at Delirium. I know that crowd makes more and more people going somewhere else. I go there as it is easy way to discuss with friends or people who recognize me.

Saturday

Took 71 bus at first stop and then went for talks…

Thorsten gave a great talk about changes in Linux kernel over twenty years. I was a bit late so watched whole talk on my way back home.

Next one was about selfish contributors. By James Bottomley. Great one! Interesting comparisons. Worth watching.

I skipped some talks from my list and discussed with several friends instead.

Next one was in AW - Stylo editor. Looked as done by academics for academics. Interesting approach. Not something for me but I understand why it was created.

UEFI: edk2 and U-Boot. Two interesting talks one after another. I wonder will my home desktop pass SCT.

Wanted to attend talk about loading fonts but room was already full. So decided to visit Embedded room instead.

Talk about Yocto Project tools was boring. But it turned out that friend leads devroom so we had nice talk during break.

Sudo talk was full so decided to go back to the hotel. Dropped stuff and went for some food and beer with friends.

Sunday

Early wake up, breakfast and then we took a risk of getting 71 on 3rd stop. Interesting challenge. Managed to squeeze into the second bus.

First was one about Thunderbird. There are interesting changes coming. Enigmail and Lighting will be integrated and new UI will come too.

Then Community room. During first talk Matt listed several chat platforms used by current generation of contributors. IRC was not one of them. I am old.

Next was about ethics in Open Source. Kind of “are all four freedoms are always needed”. Worth watching.

Then pile of bad luck. Virtualization devroom was full. I planned to attend talk about virtio-fs which just went into kernel and lands in qemu.

Open Source Design one had long queue. Once I managed to enter room, I left. No seats so UI/UX tricks have to wait in queue of videos to watch.

Went back to the K building. Took polar from cloakroom (left there a day before) and went for “coreboot on AMD processors” talk. Met Marek so decided to allow other people go. It was “go for fun” category anyway as I no longer have any hardware supported by this project.

As I got tired, there could be just one decision: go to Janson to find a good seat for Maddog’s talk and all after.

Talk about postmarketOS and Maemo Leste showed that not much changed since Openmoko times. Long list of different attempts to make OS for mobile phones. And that there are people still using Nokia n900 “so called phone”.

Maddog was old as usual. Great talk. Definitely to watch if you missed.

And then was one about FOSDEM history. Several facts, funny moment with name of organizer of first OSDEM (watch video!). Have to watch it again as presenter was quite hard to understand. Turned out that attendees took “come in oldest FOSDEM t-shirt you have” serious as each year was covered!

Exhausted went to the hotel. Dropped stuff, ate something and went for beer with friends. And sleep. Without friends.

Monday

This time OpenEmbedded workshop organized by Philip Balister. Was good to meet some old friends.

Talks went from containers to BSPs, signing binaries and some other stuff I skipped.

Last talk was about past, present and future. Here I tried to help with some facts. And idea of collecting history of OE came. Will look at it - wiki page should be enough. Just finding facts and people who remember will take time.

Videos

During meeting I download set of videos for way back home.

“18 years of Blender” was great! I spent nearly an hour at TXL airport watching “Elephant’s dream”, “Big Buck Bunny”, “Sintel” and “Tears of steel”. Will watch rest of them the other day.

Turned out that talk about font loading was worth fetching. Have to check my blog and maybe do some tweaks.

One about coreboot was like I expected. Skipped most of it to check what was on slides.

Nouveau status update I ended even faster. Will check website is there any hope for using it on GTX 1050Ti as so far I use closed source one.

Summary

Will I go next year? Sure, I do — I can not afford to not be there.

96 boards again?

2015-03-12T17:20:00+01:00

During Linaro Connect 2015 Asia there was announcement about new Linaro project called “96boards”. It is about making cheap ARM/AArch64 boards in same form factor and same placement of ports. And first board named HiKey was presented. Today third one — from Qualcomm. So we have two boards now (2/96 was not yet announced).

I prefer not to comment on form factor, lack of Ethernet, mobile phone cpus and other things people do not like but about software requirements.

96boards specification v1.0 says:

Minimum Software requirements for 96Boards certification will include:

Boot architecture (open source implementations are strongly recommended)

Support for bootloader such as U-Boot/FDT, UEFI/ACPI, UEFI/FDT

Support for a secure execution environment (optional)

Support for ARM Trusted Firmware (ARMv8), including PSCI APIs (optional)

Accelerated graphics support

Accelerated graphics drivers need to be fully supported either with open source code, or through royalty free binary drivers. If binary drivers are utilized, the vendor will provide support to provide updated drivers/libraries to support new mainline Linux kernel features.

Kernel

A kernel based on one of the following that is buildable from source code and any required binary blobs:

kernel.org latest “mainline” or “stable” kernel

The latest Google-supported Android kernel version

One of the last two kernel.org LTS kernels (for example Linaro LSK)

Operating system

The latest released (stable) version of one or more of the following open source distributions shall be made available for a 96Boards CE compliant design:

Android

Debian or Ubuntu

Fedora or Red Hat

An OpenEmbedded/Yocto build of a Linux distribution

I hoped that Linaro will be a place where free/open source software would matter. But it looks like “let release whatever you want as long as size and ports match” deal. Any blob as bootloader, binary graphics drivers (does someone remember TI OMAP line and PowerVR? Those boards run with raw framebuffer nowadays).

And that kernel requirement… HiKey uses cpu which is not in mainline kernel, so does Qualcomm one. Are they in AOSP kernel? Maybe. But does someone else than Android uses those trees for serious work? Latest I see in kernel-msm (which may not be proper place to check) is 3.10 which was released (in mainline) nearly 2 years ago…

I really wonder how “latest released (stable) version” of Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu can be made available for those boards when all those distributions use mainline kernel only (I do not count user generated remixes which are not supported by anyone).

So I wonder will 96/96 board came with mainline support, open bootloader and open drivers for everything. Time will show. Until that I am not so interested.

96boards?

2015-02-09T17:39:00+01:00

So today Linaro announced their first board from 96boards project. It is named HiKey and is based on HiSilicon cpu for mobile phones.

I had an occasion to see that board during FOSDEM and decided to write something about it after it land on my desk (which will happen sooner or later). But I have read specification for this and next boards and decided to write few words from my perspective.

First thing? Footprint. Good that two sizes are available for designs as not everyone may want to squeeze into small one.

Second? Ports. 2015 year and no Ethernet, no SATA? Sure, first board is based on SoC from a mobile phone but there is no place on small board for them and extended version looks like not allow for extra ports too.

Next? Power supply. 8-18V in a world where everything is on 5V already. The only place where 12V is mentioned in spec is “external fan power”.

So as we are on voltage… Serial at pins and 1.8V level. Nice way of forcing everyone to buy new serial dongle (Arduino ones are 3.3 or 5V).

But assume that we got it powered and have serial connected. How to boot it? According to specs mainline kernel (or AOSP one or LTE one) has to be used. I wonder how HiSilicon cpu is supported in any of those. From what I read during day (on quite slow connection) it is still not in a kernel…

Graphics situation is still shitty. Vendor is allowed to provide binary blobs to get display working. Did they not learnt from OMAP? PowerVR again someone? But sure, plain framebuffer is all you need. OpenGL is for weak.

I prefer not to discuss about selection of signals on low/high connectors. There are more capable people for it. I only wonder why 2mm raster where nearly all boards I had played with had 2.500 one.

I like list of distributions listed as ones to choose. No longer Android/Ubuntu but also Debian, Fedora or OpenEmbedded based one

But give them time. It is just first board and next ones are announced. Marvell will produce one (they are in a Linaro group for it), other will (probably) follow. Hope that there will be something better.

2 years of AArch64 work

2014-10-08T19:55:00+02:00

I do not remember exactly when I started working on ARMv8 stuff. Checked old emails from Linaro times and found that we discussed AArch64 bootstrap using OpenEmbedded during Linaro Connect Asia (June 2012). But it had to wait a bit…

First we took OpenEmbedded and created all tasks/images we needed but built them for 32-bit ARM. But during September we had all toolchain parts available: binutils was public, gcc was public, glibc was on a way to be released. I remember that moment when built first “helloworld” — probably as one of first people outside ARM and their hardware partners.

At first week of October we had ARMv8 sprint in Cambridge, UK (in Linaro and ARM offices). When I arrived and took a seat I got information that glibc just went public. Fetched, rebased my OpenEmbedded tree to drop traces of “private” patches and started build. Once finished all went public at git.linaro.org repository.

But we still lacked hardware… The only thing available was Versatile Express emulator which required license from ARM Ltd. But then free (but proprietary) emulator was released so everyone was able to boot our images. OMG it was so slow…

Then fun porting work started. Patched this, that, sent patches to OpenEmbedded and to upstream projects and time was going. And going.

In January 2013 I started X11 on emulated AArch64. Had to wait few months before other distributions went to that point.

February 2013 was nice moment as Debian/Ubuntu team presented their AArch64 port. It was their first architecture bootstrapped without using external toolchains. Work was done in Ubuntu due to different approach to development than Debian has. All work was merged back so some time later Debian also had AArch64 port.

It was March or April when OpenSUSE did mass build of whole distribution for AArch64. They had biggest amount of packages built for quite long time. But I did not tracked their progress too much.

And then 31st May came. A day when I left Linaro. But I was already after call with Red Hat so future looked quite bright ;D

June was month when first silicon was publicly presented. I do not know what Jon Masters was showing but it probably was some prototype from Applied Micro.

On 1st August I got officially hired by Red Hat and started month later. My wife was joking that next step would be Retired Software Engineer ;D

So I moved from OpenEmbedded to Fedora with my AArch64 work. Lot of work here was already done as Fedora developers were planning 64-bit ARM port few years before — when it was at design phase. So when Fedora 15 was bootstrapped for “armhf” it was done as preparation for AArch64. 64-bit ARM port was started in October 2012 with Fedora 17 packages (and switched to Fedora 19 during work).

My first task at Red Hat was getting Qt4 working properly. That beast took few days in foundation model… Good that we got first hardware then so it went faster. 1-2 months later and I had remote APM Mustang available for my porting work.

In January 2014 QEmu got AArch64 system emulation. People started migrating from foundation model.

Next months were full of hardware announcements. AMD, Cavium, Freescale, Marvell, Mediatek, NVidia, Qualcomm and others.

In meantime I decided to make crazy experiment with OpenEmbedded. I was first to use it to build for AArch64 so why not be first to build OE on 64-bit ARM?

And then June came. With APM Mustang for use at home. Finally X11 forwarding started to be useful. One of first things to do was running firefox on AArch64 just to make fun of running software which porting/upstreaming took me biggest amount of time.

Did not took me long to get idea of transforming APM Mustang (which I named “pinkiepie” as all machines at my home are named after cartoon characters) into ARMv8 desktop. Still waiting for PCI Express riser and USB host support.

Now we have October. Soon will be 2 years since people got foundation model available. And there are rumors about AArch64 development boards in production with prices below 100 USD. Will do what needed to get one of them on my desk ;)