On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 4:20 PM, Derek Atkins <warl...@mit.edu> wrote: > Jon, > > Thanks for the reply. I certainly don't have the hardware to host a v5 > koji. All I own are 2 Sheevas and 2 Gurus (and not even the "Server > Plus" models). Moreover, one of my Sheevas is in "critical" production > on my network so I can't really pull it away to perform other duties. > > I was actually looking at a Cubieboard to get some newer, more powerful > hardware, because the Guru is way too low powered to run my MySQL > instance. I may even find that the Cubie is too low-powered, but > obviously cannot test that until I have one or have access to one. > Regardless, right now I don't have the budget to acquire new hardware, > which is why I'd like to continue using what I already own. > > Not being intimately familiar with the various changes in the hardware I > guess I just don't understand why we need so many target-specific > distributions? I thought the only issue was the floating point ABI > issue, which would lead me to believe that we only would need two, FP > and non-FP? Is there really a significant speed improvement with > e.g. v7 or v8 when compiled specifically vs. running e.g. v6 on a v7 or > v8? ISTR that measurements showed some but relatively insignificant > speed differences, so why not just stay at the lowest level to support > more hardware?
Basically ARMv7 is the current generation of chipsets. ARMv5 and ARMv6 is basically dead. ARMv5 SoCs are end of line in ARM and as they require things like DDR1 they are getting expensive for manufacturers to produce so available hardware is dwindling. They also only support a max of 1gb of ram and are limited. ARM is moving all the remaining users of v5 onto platforms like Cortex-A5 chips that use more modern memory and are cheaper to produce. There have never been that many ARMv5 platforms suitable to running fedora with the kirkwood plugs basically being it, the HW isn't that capable and availability will only shink with time. It's not an insignificant amount of effort to support this platform. I think I as the person that basically does all the kernel maintenance and all the building of packages and the vast majority of fixing of the problematic packages or chasing people to fix them I think I'm one of the few that is able to quantify this time and effort. To go with that there's frankly not a lot of people actually bothering to test armv5 and this is categorised with the fact that some core packages and functionality were broken in F-18 for quite some time and not even reported so issues like that helped us make up our mind whether it was critical to test. F-17 download numbers I don't believe were large. Ultimately we need to assess where our efforts are best directed to get our best bang for our buck. Most of those that are doing significant work on the platform are volunteers. The fact is that while it is sad for us to be dropping the support I don't believe it's the best way for those people that are doing their work for them to invest their time for a platform that ARM themselves is dead with limited machines available now and their availability in new products moving forward it's basically extinct. Regards, Peter _______________________________________________ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
