On 10/06/2012 11:07 AM, Jon Masters wrote:
Hi Gordan,
On 10/06/2012 05:58 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
On 10/06/2012 10:43 AM, Jon Masters wrote:
Hi Folks,
I'm interested to know who is using Kirkwood, and who would miss it if
it went away. For now, we won't kill off ARMv5 because it is used in the
official rPi builds but that doesn't mean I'm not interested to know
whether we should put testing effort into Kirkwood for F18.
My thought is that the latest plugs are moving to ARMv7, and so as the
cutting edge Linux distro, we should make plans for deprecating support
over the coming releases. This is not a call to drop support today. If I
can get numbers on how many people care, that will help.
It be very careful about dropping Kirkwood. The original SheevaPlug and
DreamPlug are still probably the most commonly available and most
commonly used ARM machines out there.
That /may/ be true. Maybe. I don't know that for sure. They certainly
were popular amongst a certain crowd. I would say the most popular board
these days is likely the rPi, followed by some of the new v7 devices,
especially the cheaper rPi-inspired AllWinner based stuff, which we
probably need to look into supporting more officially.
In terms of new purchases - maybe. But in terms of what's actually out
there in people's hands already at the moment, I think Kirkwoods are
much more numerous. Pi and the Via APC suffer from the lack of RAM,
which makes Kirkwoods with more than double the usable RAM rather
appealing on the price/performance tradeoff.
Personally I don't really care if you drop the kernel support for them
in latest Fedora because I build my own kernels anyway, but I suspect
that opinions on this list may not be representative - membership of
this list is likely to be skewed toward the developer audience rather
than the users who expect to just dump the image on the SD card and use
the device.
Sure. But then, this is a volunteer community and we're short on
resources. We want to ultimately have a Fedora ARM kernel maintainer but
we're not there yet. And it would be better to support a small number of
devices well - and allow others to do their own thing - than try to be
all things to all people. That isn't going to scale well. One day, we'll
all be using v8 devices with a unified kernel, but not yet.
The other thing that may be worth assessing is the user experience with
various devices. My experience is that the UX with < 200MB of RAM and
GUI use with modern distributions is... unpleasant.
Perhaps when SheevaPlug and DreamPlug are no longer available to buy
new, it might be OK to drop Kirkwood support, but I'd be weary of losing
it before then.
Are you volunteering to support them? :)
Sure, but only for the EL6 based kernels, not the new Fedora ones. :)
Joking aside, I ask because
from where I'm sitting (well, lying down, it's 6am) there isn't a lot of
testing happening on the plugs right now, few people if any are running
F18 kernels on them and giving feedback, etc. So maybe you are the more
typical user there - someone who is going to build their own kernel
anyway and just wants a v5 userspace they can pick up.
Are there statistics available for the download counts for different SoC
kernels? That might give a reasonable indication of how popular various
SoCs are with Fedora users.
Gordan
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