Please take notes here
(not an official ARM talk)

armel
=====
 First released with Lenny. soft-float EABI. v4t which also runs smaller-size
thumb instruction set. Targetting old hardware like openmoko.
v5 is no faster than v4t. Software floating point assumed.

armhf
=====
 First release will be Wheezy. v7 (latest released version of the ARM family)
VFPv3-D16. Hardware floating point. Benchmarks show that you get anything 
from 0 to 20% improvement in real-life code. In any case, you lose nothing. 
New agreed standard for ARM Linux. Mono does not do useful floating point.
libffi issues variadic functions using floating point.

buildds
=======
 Around 96% coverage, similar to armel. Lack of arm servers, so far. Use
development boards. Marvell Feroceon for armel, Freescale im53 for armhf. 1Gb
of RAM, which is an issue for huge C++ apps that have to the linking in swap.

Elsewhere
=========

 Raspbian: unofficial ports for Raspberry pie. v6 hard float, 
 forward compatible with armhf.

 Ubuntu port was v7 soft float, downgraded to v5 soft float armel.
 Added armhf 12.04 LTS release.

 OpenSUSE: focus on v7 hard float. Low priority v5. Possible 12.2 release.

 Fedora: F17 release but problems with linker path.
 RedHat: likely to wait for Fedora to decide on a primary architecture.

 Mageia, Gentoo, ChromeOS, Android.

New stuff!

 Virtualisation: servers.
 
 LPAE: still 32bit with support for large physical address extension (bigmem)
 
 UEFI: standard boot architecture / bootloaders. Use UEFI with device tree & ACPI.

More new stuff:

ARMv8, 64 bit capable. Next talk.

Graphics acceleration: free drivers? most x86 vendors are starting to open up.
 For ARM: no good reason why but most players will not share.
 Some reverse engineering happening but binary blobs will remain for now.

Common amongst distros to have multiple ARM ports - need to support FreedomBox,
GuruPlug, SheevaPlug etc. v7 is needed for the performance advance.
64bit ARMv8 should be durable.