Efika MX on the way

Thanks to Luca Barbato (known as lu_zero in Gentooland), I’ll be able to put my hands for some days on this nice ARM board made by Genesi, the Efika MX.

As it happened with the BeagleBone, the idea is to work out the kernel, bootloader integration and create weekly automatic builds of Gentoo and Sabayon images (those you can just cat to the MMC card). It is more or less what happens with Gentoo stage3 autobuilds, but here we have kernel binaries and u-boot, so that the image can boot straight away.

So far, qemu-user (statically compiled) + OpenSUSE patches, besides minor bugs, are working quite well. Depending on the availability of these boards on the market and project financial capabilities, we’ll be able to couple qemu-user with native hardware on the build server making them work side by side without the need of a shared binhost repo (sshfs + chroot magic, I’ll talk about it in future).

One more step for these chroots will be attaching matter to it, as we already do for i686 and x86_64 ones. This way the compilation of new ebuilds (and 70% of chroot work) will be completely automated.