Monday, April 29, 2013

Is running Eclipse on Raspberry Pi possible?

During the weekend I stumbled upon Bug 406749 Create native launcher and product export option for Raspberry Pi, which prodded me to do the long postponed task of contributing patches that has been used in Fedora to built Eclipse for arm.

My patches provide generic arm bundles. It is a part of the work. According to Fedora documentation, Arm processors exist in two versions -  software and hardware floating points. I guess that Eclipse built on one of them might not work on the other one, and it will be necessary to split each arm fragment in two.

It's also worth to consider if Eclipse on arm without FPU is really something we want - it will be unbelievably slow.

But straight to the point - I tested various amounts of memory assigned to maven for the purpose of Eclipse build - and it started succeeding only if maven was granted 900MB. That eliminates Raspberry Pi forever. Sorry for sad news :-(.

However, if you are interested in building Eclipse on various mobile devices, and you'd like to try out those patches, I'd be happy to hear the results!

And a small poll for the end (results can be found here, but please do the poll first!):


 

3 comments:

  1. Hi Daniel, if you look at the development process of the "Hardfloat Linux distribution" Raspbian for the Raspberry Pi you'll see that they used different ARM based hardware having 4GB main memory as a build-platform.

    I'd recommend to start digging in the official Raspberry Pi forums.

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    Replies
    1. Hey,

      I'm aware of high profile arm builders ;-). Fedora for ARM is built on something ;-).

      The point is that 256MB of RAM is not enough to run Eclipse IDE. 512 might be enough to start it, but it will not be usable.

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  2. The launchers are needed for bare equinox OSGi as well, so thanks for the patches!

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