Readit News- mentioned which board had 143 minutes, added info about time on Milk-V Megrez board
- added section 'what we need hw-wise for being in fedora'
- added link to my desktop post to point that it is aarch64, not x86-64
- wording around qemu to show that I use it locally only
Tool vs Toy.
Would you call Threadripper system "a normal build"? For many people they are normal builds because they need more computing power or more PCIe lanes than "normal user" desktop has.
On the other side you have those who pretend to use raspberry/pi 3 as "an Arm desktop" despite only 1GB of ram and 4 sluggish cores.
Q64-22 on eBay (US) for $150-200 USD / 542-723 PLN.
So you cannot run Linux natively on currently-in-store Mac hardware.
And raspberry/pi is a toy. Without any good support in mainline Linux.
In my previous post https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2025/06/20/the-hunt-for-a-... I wrote:
> There were “Arm V9” systems before it, so it was not “World’s First”. There were several blobs needed to run it, so it was not “Open Source”.
It should also be possible to patch Linux itself to support different page sizes in different processes/address spaces, which it currently doesn't. It would be quite fiddly (which is why it hasn't happened so far) but it should be technically feasible.
IIRC ARM64 hardware also has some special support (compared to x86 and x86-64) for handling multiple-page "blocks" - that kind of bridges the gap between a smaller and larger page size, opening up further scenarios for better support on the OS side.
Fedora does not have a way to cross compile packages. The only cross compiler available in repositories is bare-metal one. You can use it to build firmware (EDK2, U-Boot) or Linux kernel. But nothing more.
Then there is the other problem: testing. What is a point of successful build if it does not work on target systems? Part of each Fedora build is running testsuite (if packaged software has any). You should not run it in QEMU so each cross-build would need to connect to target system, upload build artifacts and run tests. Overcomplicated.
Native builds allows to test is distribution ready for any kind of use. I use AArch64 desktop daily for almost a year now. But it is not "4core/16GB ram SBC" but rather "server-as-a-desktop" kind (80 cores, 128 GB ram, plenty of PCI-Express lanes). And I build software on, write blog posts, watch movies etc. And can emulate other Fedora architectures to do test builds.
Hardware architecture slow today, can be fast in the future. In 2013 building Qt4 for Fedora/AArch64 took days (we used software emulators). Now it takes 18 minutes.