On 06/10/2012 15:11, Peter Robinson wrote:
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.
In people's hands the RPi would win hands down. There's well over a
quarter of a million of them out there.
And while I agree the RPi suffers from a lack of RAM there's a lot of
cheap ARMv7 devices appearing now with 1Gb of RAM and a lot higher
specs than either the RPi or any kirkwood based device for well less
than $100. In the case of the Cubieboard it will be $15 more for 4
times the RAM and a lot of extra features like SATA.
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. :)
So in fact your not volunteering to do anything other than offer your
opinion :-)
Perhaps. But distro-wise, at least I have a readily available
alternative to Fedora for people who want to stick with Kirkwoods. :)
Gordan
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