[Pkg-ganeti-devel] New upload & arch specs

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos]

On 11:38 Fri 02 Aug     , Apollon Oikonomopoulos wrote:
> Currently 2.7 fails to build on armel, armhf, mips, mipsel, s390 and 
> s390x, while 2.5.2 was previously built there, flagging ganeti 
> out-of-date.  This is because the newer Haskell components make use of 
> Template Haskell, which in turn requires GHCi at compile time. GHCi 
> itself is not available on all platforms:
> 
>           http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Platforms

A bit more on that:

The ghc build system states that it supports ghci on ARM:

ghc-7.6.3/mk/config.mk:

  ArchSupportsGHCi=$(strip $(patsubst $(TargetArch_CPP), YES, $(findstring $(TargetArch_CPP), i386 x86_64 powerpc sparc sparc64 arm)))

The debian package however explicitly disables it:

ghc-7.6.3/debian/rules:

  ifneq (,$(findstring $(DEB_HOST_ARCH),armel armhf))
          # GHCi is too badly broken on ARM; see
          # http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7794
          echo "GhcWithInterpreter = NO" >> mk/build.mk
  endif

According to the ticket above, proper GHCi support for ARM is targeted for
7.8.1. Out of all the non-x86 platforms, I think ARM is the most promising
(with dense ARM server boards reputedly around the corner) and it would be
interesting for Ganeti to support it.

As a side-note, qemu-kvm has been renamed to qemu-system-x86 in unstable and
newer qemu versions ship kvm only as a compatibility wrapper around
qemu-system-x86, issuing a deprecation warning on run. We should check and see
when and how we will provide a clean upgrade path getting rid of /usr/bin/kvm
completely, which is not as straightforward as passing

        ./configure --with-kvm-path=/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86 

because the latter doesn't enable KVM acceleration by default.

Cheers,
Apollon