Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/11/2012 08:03 PM, Brendan Conoboy wrote: On 10/11/2012 03:10 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote: Just out of interest, which packages are you referring to? I am assuming it is LibreOffice + a small subset of whatever is in Fedora that isn't in EL; mainly because I had no RAM/swap/CPU issues building any the 2000 or so packages that overlap. Takes about 3-4 weeks on a _single_ SheevaPlug. You're building 2000 packages, we're building 12000. You also have more hardware than me. :p My build farm consists of 5 Kirkwoods. Libreoffice is definitely one one of the problem packages where an armv7hl builder is called for. The koji server has a special 'heavybuilder' group which handles such packages. Are you using USB storage on your sheevaplug? It surprises me that you can get through even 2000 in 3 weeks unless half of them are noarch ;-) 3. Certain features such as atomic operations aren't available on armv5, reducing the number of packages that can be built for ARM in total: If it fails on armv5 but works on armv7, we still don't get it for armv7. In _most_ packages that require this, there are patches that address it. According to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Fedora17_rawhide openmpi, pixie, mongodb are all currently broken due to atomics. This blocks condor, iwhd, perl-MongoDB, netcdf*, espresso, gdl, gdal, gromacs, ScientificPython, towhee, pypar, orsa, R-RScaLAPACK, nco, which in turn blocks even more packages. This is not an exhaustive list. Most of which, interestingly, don't appear to be in EL. I guess that part of fun awaits me when I move onto building EPEL... This also doesn't consider that some package builds are transiently successful and transiently fail due to thread-safe issues which aren't coded for in armv5tel. Indeed, I have seen that. Hence why I have reduced my build farm to Kirkwoods, and removed the (more cost effective in CPU/£) AC100s. SMPs threw a wobble every once in a while. Gordan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/11/2012 08:03 PM, Brendan Conoboy wrote: On 10/11/2012 03:10 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote: Just out of interest, which packages are you referring to? I am assuming it is LibreOffice + a small subset of whatever is in Fedora that isn't in EL; mainly because I had no RAM/swap/CPU issues building any the 2000 or so packages that overlap. Takes about 3-4 weeks on a _single_ SheevaPlug. You're building 2000 packages, we're building 12000. Libreoffice is definitely one one of the problem packages where an armv7hl builder is called for. I readily admit that the build time of a week is excessive. The koji server has a special 'heavybuilder' group which handles such packages. Are you using USB storage on your sheevaplug? It surprises me that you can get through even 2000 in 3 weeks unless half of them are noarch ;-) I use iSCSI (ext4 build area on one of the hosts for the packages that fail self-tests on NFS) and NFS (for everything else) backed by a reasonably beefy storage box. Gordan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Fri, 2012-10-12 at 09:40 +0100, Gordan Bobic wrote: I use iSCSI (ext4 build area on one of the hosts for the packages that fail self-tests on NFS) and NFS (for everything else) backed by a reasonably beefy storage box. Why no just iSCSI ? I am guessing you have some numbers to compare as you usually do. And what about kirkwoods with sata + average-speed spinning hd vs NFS/ext4 over iSCSI.on a gigabit. ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/12/2012 09:55 AM, Yanko Kaneti wrote: On Fri, 2012-10-12 at 09:40 +0100, Gordan Bobic wrote: I use iSCSI (ext4 build area on one of the hosts for the packages that fail self-tests on NFS) and NFS (for everything else) backed by a reasonably beefy storage box. Why no just iSCSI ? I am guessing you have some numbers to compare as you usually do. I haven't tested it, but I wouldn't expect much difference. NFS is pretty efficient, and it's designed for that specific mode of operation. If anything I'd expect it to be faster than iSCSI. But the main reason I use it is because having shared storage is convenient for a lot of reasons. And what about kirkwoods with sata + average-speed spinning hd vs NFS/ext4 over iSCSI.on a gigabit. That would require a separate disk per builder, it'd still need some shared storage for convenience, and the IOPS would never be as good as what you can provide with a bigger storage box on the network. For example, my storage box (shared, not dedicated to the build farm) has 13x1TB disks in ZFS RAIDZ2 (using ZoL) and 16GB of RAM. It seamlessly churns out several times more IOPS than my small build farm can consume, even during the I/O intensive operations such as extracting src.rpms, and cleaning up build space. For cleanup, iSCSI+ext4 might be faster, but ultimately I don't particularly want to have to buy more disks. Having them all in one box is convenient and plenty fast enough. Gordan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 09:46:37PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote: Marvell? Asking who in particular? And what configuration. There's a lot of kirkwood chips with 128Mb or less RAM which makes it a little pointless for a Fedora image and hence IMO not relevant. A Seagate dockstar has only 128Mb RAM and boots Fedora without a problem. Why should it not be used with Fedora? Debian supports it without problems as well. Regards Till ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 01:37:51PM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote: Brendan Conoboy b...@redhat.com writes: Personally I'd be fine if we consider Kirkwood to be server only (i.e. headless). So to me that implies that a lack of Libreoffice is okay. Granted, I don't know if that's okay from a Fedora standpoint. I would not miss Libreoffice as well. As far as I know many Kirkwood devices do no have any connector for a display, e.g. the Guru plug, Sheeva plug or Dockstar. Regards Till ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Friday, October 12, 2012, 1:51:43 PM, Till Maas wrote: On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 01:37:51PM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote: Brendan Conoboy b...@redhat.com writes: Personally I'd be fine if we consider Kirkwood to be server only (i.e. headless). So to me that implies that a lack of Libreoffice is okay. Granted, I don't know if that's okay from a Fedora standpoint. I would not miss Libreoffice as well. As far as I know many Kirkwood devices do no have any connector for a display, e.g. the Guru plug, Sheeva plug or Dockstar. My OpenRD Client has VGA and SATA disk. ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/10/2012 06:47 PM, Derek Atkins wrote: Peter Robinsonpbrobin...@gmail.com writes: Might as well wait until the whole 32-bit branch can be dropped. Practically all x86 CPU made in most of the past decade is x86-64. Half decade maybe as Intel first introduced 64 bit CPUs in early 2005 and it took a while to spread through their product set, and there was a lot of Atom CPUs that weren't 64 bit capable. But I agree the reasons for 32 is slowly receding. Sure, but we're a decade later. Kirkwood devices were just released what? 3 years ago? I certainly got mine more recently than that. DreamPlug (v1) was only released about 18 months ago. Gordan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Gordan Bobic gor...@bobich.net wrote: On 10/10/2012 05:55 PM, Derek Atkins 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. All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too. I use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out if Fedora dropped support for them. I know a bunch of other people who have other kirkwood devices, too. If you read the full thread it's not about dropping the support in the short term. I did read the thread, but our definitions of short term appear to be different. The thread appeared to be a question of support for F18 or F19. IMNSHO I feel Kirkwood support should probably remain until, oh, F25 or 26, at a minimum. There are just too many (IMHO) Kirkwoods out in production. More to the point, they are still being made and sold in reasonable quantity. I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??) That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to single unit. Glad to hear that. However I'm loathe to throw away my investment of Kirkwoods. I cannot answer you how many others bought them. Have you tried asking them for approximate numbers? 512MB of usable RAM on a SheevaPlug is also a lot easier to live with than 192MB of usable RAM on the Pi. If the VIA APC was cited as an alternative, then maybe I could almost get behind that in due course (512MB of RAM, *TX form factor). But running one of the default desktop environments with a browser that actually works reasonably well for most commonly used websites (i.e. not Midori) in 192MB of RAM? While swapping to an average SD card? Do be serious. I've never said 192Mb of RAM is reasonable so I think you'll find I'm completely serious, but then neither is 512Mb. With devices like the cubieboard, gooseberry, wandboard and numerous others coming out with 1Gb of RAM I personally don't see the kirkwood nor the RPi as any for of serious. What's more the cubieboard will be only $14 more than the RPi. The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort? It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort. Oh? Could you elaborate on that? What quite a lot of effort does it take? From my experience of rolling a similar distribution, if the kernel code works as it's supposed to, a day or so of tweaking the configs, followed by about a day of compiling (in a 1.2GHz Kirkwood). If there are issues? Much longer because the compile takes so long. I don't have 2 days to spare to deal with that. If someone else does that is absolutely fabulous. I'm yet to see them actually step up to the plate and do the work. Clearly you're not interested in doing any work what so ever, I've not actually seen a contribution from you at all. Fedora no longer supports Pentium actually. It was dropped some time ago (around Fedora 12 from memory). The lowest level of support in Fedora for x86 is now Pentium Pro (Basically i586 + CMOV) which allows support for the OLPC XO-1 (AMD Geode Processor) and the only reason it's still at that level is because there's around 1.5 million XO-1 united deployed and still be actively used and upgraded to current Fedora releases (The just released 12.1.0 is based on Fedora 17, the under development 13.1.0 release is based on Fedora 18). I know mainline Fedora would like to drop the support for that too if they could. So what you're saying is that Fedora *still* supports an x32 CPU that was released well over a decade ago... The important point to be made is that both Kirkwood and i686 class machines are still in production and available to buy new today. You've made that point and the point that I've made numerous times is the decision isn't being made today so it's somewhat of a mute point. Peter ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/11/2012 10:51 AM, Peter Robinson wrote: On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Gordan Bobicgor...@bobich.net wrote: On 10/10/2012 05:55 PM, Derek Atkins 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. All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too. I use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out if Fedora dropped support for them. I know a bunch of other people who have other kirkwood devices, too. If you read the full thread it's not about dropping the support in the short term. I did read the thread, but our definitions of short term appear to be different. The thread appeared to be a question of support for F18 or F19. IMNSHO I feel Kirkwood support should probably remain until, oh, F25 or 26, at a minimum. There are just too many (IMHO) Kirkwoods out in production. More to the point, they are still being made and sold in reasonable quantity. I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??) That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to single unit. Glad to hear that. However I'm loathe to throw away my investment of Kirkwoods. I cannot answer you how many others bought them. Have you tried asking them for approximate numbers? 512MB of usable RAM on a SheevaPlug is also a lot easier to live with than 192MB of usable RAM on the Pi. If the VIA APC was cited as an alternative, then maybe I could almost get behind that in due course (512MB of RAM, *TX form factor). But running one of the default desktop environments with a browser that actually works reasonably well for most commonly used websites (i.e. not Midori) in 192MB of RAM? While swapping to an average SD card? Do be serious. I've never said 192Mb of RAM is reasonable so I think you'll find I'm completely serious, but then neither is 512Mb. With devices like the cubieboard, gooseberry, wandboard and numerous others coming out with 1Gb of RAM I personally don't see the kirkwood nor the RPi as any for of serious. What's more the cubieboard will be only $14 more than the RPi. Two points: 1) If that's what you think, I'd really like to stop seeing the Pi as an excuse for dropping or including anything and pandering to it. 2) 500MB-ish of RAM is actually enough for a decent user experience. I am a daily user of a Toshiba AC100, and use it daily with KDE as my desktop environment and Firefox as my browser. With 480MB of RAM, the experience is comfortable. With a few tweaks the experience stretches to pleasant: http://www.altechnative.net/2012/01/04/alleviating-memory-pressure-on-toshiba-ac100/ The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort? It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort. Oh? Could you elaborate on that? What quite a lot of effort does it take? From my experience of rolling a similar distribution, if the kernel code works as it's supposed to, a day or so of tweaking the configs, followed by about a day of compiling (in a 1.2GHz Kirkwood). If there are issues? Much longer because the compile takes so long. I don't have 2 days to spare to deal with that. If someone else does that is absolutely fabulous. I'm yet to see them actually step up to the plate and do the work. Clearly you're not interested in doing any work what so ever, I've not actually seen a contribution from you at all. I've had an issue with the attitude for pursuing the bleeding edge in Fedora for a while - that's why I decided to roll a different distribution. When most of your bug reports expire due to the release running EOL it rather puts a downer on the motivation to bother contributing with the goal posts moving so fast at the expense of stability. Gordan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Gordan Bobic gor...@bobich.net wrote: On 10/11/2012 10:51 AM, Peter Robinson wrote: On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Gordan Bobicgor...@bobich.net wrote: On 10/10/2012 05:55 PM, Derek Atkins 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. All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too. I use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out if Fedora dropped support for them. I know a bunch of other people who have other kirkwood devices, too. If you read the full thread it's not about dropping the support in the short term. I did read the thread, but our definitions of short term appear to be different. The thread appeared to be a question of support for F18 or F19. IMNSHO I feel Kirkwood support should probably remain until, oh, F25 or 26, at a minimum. There are just too many (IMHO) Kirkwoods out in production. More to the point, they are still being made and sold in reasonable quantity. I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??) That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to single unit. Glad to hear that. However I'm loathe to throw away my investment of Kirkwoods. I cannot answer you how many others bought them. Have you tried asking them for approximate numbers? 512MB of usable RAM on a SheevaPlug is also a lot easier to live with than 192MB of usable RAM on the Pi. If the VIA APC was cited as an alternative, then maybe I could almost get behind that in due course (512MB of RAM, *TX form factor). But running one of the default desktop environments with a browser that actually works reasonably well for most commonly used websites (i.e. not Midori) in 192MB of RAM? While swapping to an average SD card? Do be serious. I've never said 192Mb of RAM is reasonable so I think you'll find I'm completely serious, but then neither is 512Mb. With devices like the cubieboard, gooseberry, wandboard and numerous others coming out with 1Gb of RAM I personally don't see the kirkwood nor the RPi as any for of serious. What's more the cubieboard will be only $14 more than the RPi. Two points: 1) If that's what you think, I'd really like to stop seeing the Pi as an excuse for dropping or including anything and pandering to it. Believe me I'm not pandering to the RPi _AT_ALL_ so again your point is completely boundless and useless. 2) 500MB-ish of RAM is actually enough for a decent user experience. I am a daily user of a Toshiba AC100, and use it daily with KDE as my desktop environment and Firefox as my browser. With 480MB of RAM, the experience is comfortable. With a few tweaks the experience stretches to pleasant: http://www.altechnative.net/2012/01/04/alleviating-memory-pressure-on-toshiba-ac100/ Great! We're not talking about dropping support for the AC100. I have one as well that one day I'll get the time to configure to my liking. The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort? It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort. Oh? Could you elaborate on that? What quite a lot of effort does it take? From my experience of rolling a similar distribution, if the kernel code works as it's supposed to, a day or so of tweaking the configs, followed by about a day of compiling (in a 1.2GHz Kirkwood). If there are issues? Much longer because the compile takes so long.bich.net wrote: On 10/11/2012 10:51 AM, Peter Robinson wrote: I don't have 2 days to spare to deal with that. If someone else does that is absolutely fabulous. I'm yet to see them actually step up to the plate and do the work. Clearly you're not interested in doing any work what so ever, I've not actually seen a contribution from you at all. I've had an issue with the attitude for pursuing the bleeding edge in Fedora for a while - that's why I decided to roll a different distribution. That's fine, you're free to take your toys along with your opinions and play in what ever sand pit you wish. When most of your bug reports expire due to the release running EOL it rather puts a downer on the motivation to bother contributing with the
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/10/2012 09:46 PM, Peter Robinson wrote: I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??) That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to single unit. Glad to hear that. However I'm loathe to throw away my investment of Kirkwoods. I cannot answer you how many others bought them. Have you tried asking them for approximate numbers? Marvell? Asking who in particular? And what configuration. There's a lot of kirkwood chips with 128Mb or less RAM which makes it a little pointless for a Fedora image and hence IMO not relevant. Asking Globalscale how many Kirkwood *Plugs they sold might be a good start. Fedora no longer supports Pentium actually. It was dropped some time ago (around Fedora 12 from memory). The lowest level of support in Fedora for x86 is now Pentium Pro (Basically i586 + CMOV) which allows support for the OLPC XO-1 (AMD Geode Processor) and the only reason it's still at that level is because there's around 1.5 million XO-1 united deployed and still be actively used and upgraded to current Fedora releases (The just released 12.1.0 is based on Fedora 17, the under development 13.1.0 release is based on Fedora 18). I know mainline Fedora would like to drop the support for that too if they could. So what you're saying is that Fedora *still* supports an x32 CPU that was released well over a decade ago... No. The XO-1 was released in 2007. That's half a decade ago. Given the project came out of MIT and you have a @mit.edu address I would hope you would be able to count, are you in politics by chance? I'm pretty sure that sort of attitude isn't doing much to attract users to the community. DreamPlug1 is Kirkwood based and it only hit the shelves less than 18 months ago. Gordan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/10/2012 07:59 PM, Brendan Conoboy wrote: On 10/10/2012 10:47 AM, Derek Atkins wrote: Sure, but we're a decade later. Kirkwood devices were just released what? 3 years ago? I certainly got mine more recently than that. I admit I've been running F12 on it, but that's only because there hadn't been another fedora release until F17. The comparison to i686 isn't really very apt. Kirkwood is more like i386, but even that's stretching the simile. There several problems with armv5tel support over the long term. 1. It's not self hosting. We have to use armv7 hosts to build most of the armv5 packages because only they have enough RAM, enough CPU time, fast enough swap. Building UP packages on SMP systems causes issues for a number of multithreaded packages. Transient failures, bugs that aren't really bugs, just packages written in the belief that armv5 code will be built and run on armv5 hosts. This problem gets worse with every release. Just out of interest, which packages are you referring to? I am assuming it is LibreOffice + a small subset of whatever is in Fedora that isn't in EL; mainly because I had no RAM/swap/CPU issues building any the 2000 or so packages that overlap. Takes about 3-4 weeks on a _single_ SheevaPlug. 3. Certain features such as atomic operations aren't available on armv5, reducing the number of packages that can be built for ARM in total: If it fails on armv5 but works on armv7, we still don't get it for armv7. In _most_ packages that require this, there are patches that address it. 5. On the whole, it's not a popular Fedora ARM target. Raspberry pi, OMAP, highbank, this is where most (not all) of our known users have hardware and interest. There are some Kirkwood users, clearly, but there are a lot more users of everything else. We should get some updated download stats on this to demonstrate, but last I saw kirkwood was maybe 3% of usage. Perhaps a poll might be a good way to ascertain this, rather than a discussion? Gordan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 04:30:24AM -0500, Dennis Gilmore wrote: El Tue, 9 Oct 2012 08:54:26 +0100 Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com escribió: On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Till Maas opensou...@till.name wrote: It seems that the disk image boots on the dockstar, but a first yum update got oom-killed and there seems to be no swap and not LVM on the image to easily change this. IMHO a problem with the Fedora ARM documentation is, that it is only a collection of reports from people how they did it. It is lacking information about why something was done as described or how it should be done. For example the Debian documentation clearly states which uboot version is required and how to update it. The Kirkwood documentation in the Fedora ARM wiki only says that the proper uboot config depends on the uboot version and gives an example that is supposed to work on a Guru Plug Server Plus. Comparing it with the Debian documentation it also shows that different hex values (addresses?) are used in the uboot config for the kernel and initramfs. But why do they need to be different? Or do they not need to be different? Also as far as I can see there are no instructions about how the images are created and why they have been chosen the way they are (no LVM, no swap, device dependent names for kernel and initramfs, vfat for /boot). not that it will explain everything but Debian ships uboot for the kirkwood devices and add features not found in the stock uboot. ext2 support being one of them which is why /boot is vfat we support the stock uboot and only ship uboot where we have to preferring instead that the vendors be responsible for supporting and supplying uboot binaries. we are still evolving the image creation process. in f17 it was a shell script that used yum. we are moving to use kickstarts and anaconda via livemedia-creator Thank you for the vfat history. Are the image creation scripts available somewhere? Is there a bug tracker for them? Regards Till ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com writes: On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Derek Atkins warl...@mit.edu wrote: Jon, Jon Masters j...@redhat.com writes: 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. All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too. I use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out if Fedora dropped support for them. I know a bunch of other people who have other kirkwood devices, too. If you read the full thread it's not about dropping the support in the short term. I did read the thread, but our definitions of short term appear to be different. The thread appeared to be a question of support for F18 or F19. IMNSHO I feel Kirkwood support should probably remain until, oh, F25 or 26, at a minimum. There are just too many (IMHO) Kirkwoods out in production. I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??) That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to single unit. Glad to hear that. However I'm loathe to throw away my investment of Kirkwoods. I cannot answer you how many others bought them. Have you tried asking them for approximate numbers? The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort? It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort. Oh? Could you elaborate on that? What quite a lot of effort does it take? Fedora no longer supports Pentium actually. It was dropped some time ago (around Fedora 12 from memory). The lowest level of support in Fedora for x86 is now Pentium Pro (Basically i586 + CMOV) which allows support for the OLPC XO-1 (AMD Geode Processor) and the only reason it's still at that level is because there's around 1.5 million XO-1 united deployed and still be actively used and upgraded to current Fedora releases (The just released 12.1.0 is based on Fedora 17, the under development 13.1.0 release is based on Fedora 18). I know mainline Fedora would like to drop the support for that too if they could. So what you're saying is that Fedora *still* supports an x32 CPU that was released well over a decade ago... Peter -derek -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH warl...@mit.eduPGP key available ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com writes: Might as well wait until the whole 32-bit branch can be dropped. Practically all x86 CPU made in most of the past decade is x86-64. Half decade maybe as Intel first introduced 64 bit CPUs in early 2005 and it took a while to spread through their product set, and there was a lot of Atom CPUs that weren't 64 bit capable. But I agree the reasons for 32 is slowly receding. Sure, but we're a decade later. Kirkwood devices were just released what? 3 years ago? I certainly got mine more recently than that. I admit I've been running F12 on it, but that's only because there hadn't been another fedora release until F17. Peter -derek -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH warl...@mit.eduPGP key available ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Derek Atkins warl...@mit.edu wrote: Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com writes: On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Derek Atkins warl...@mit.edu wrote: Jon, Jon Masters j...@redhat.com writes: 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. All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too. I use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out if Fedora dropped support for them. I know a bunch of other people who have other kirkwood devices, too. If you read the full thread it's not about dropping the support in the short term. I did read the thread, but our definitions of short term appear to be different. The thread appeared to be a question of support for F18 or F19. IMNSHO I feel Kirkwood support should probably remain until, oh, F25 or 26, at a minimum. There are just too many (IMHO) Kirkwoods out in production. The original question posed by John has sort of been muted. His original intention was asking about testing and blocking of releases based on kirkwood. The fact was that kirkwood isn't a release blocker and issues can be fixed later. It actual fact it read completely differently so I added confusion to the thread. And remain where? In secondary arch... sure. I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??) That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to single unit. Glad to hear that. However I'm loathe to throw away my investment of Kirkwoods. I cannot answer you how many others bought them. Have you tried asking them for approximate numbers? Marvell? Asking who in particular? And what configuration. There's a lot of kirkwood chips with 128Mb or less RAM which makes it a little pointless for a Fedora image and hence IMO not relevant. The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort? It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort. Oh? Could you elaborate on that? What quite a lot of effort does it take? It takes a lot of my time to maintain packages that build on armv5, whether it be chasing upstream maintainers to fix breakages (see the issues with glibc on rawhide as a recent example), dealing with packages that use atomics which armv5 doesn't support. Attempting to beg people to test rawhide releases to ensure the HW does actually work with the releases before we hit final because I don't have HW and personally don't have the time to do so even if I had the HW. Fedora no longer supports Pentium actually. It was dropped some time ago (around Fedora 12 from memory). The lowest level of support in Fedora for x86 is now Pentium Pro (Basically i586 + CMOV) which allows support for the OLPC XO-1 (AMD Geode Processor) and the only reason it's still at that level is because there's around 1.5 million XO-1 united deployed and still be actively used and upgraded to current Fedora releases (The just released 12.1.0 is based on Fedora 17, the under development 13.1.0 release is based on Fedora 18). I know mainline Fedora would like to drop the support for that too if they could. So what you're saying is that Fedora *still* supports an x32 CPU that was released well over a decade ago... No. The XO-1 was released in 2007. That's half a decade ago. Given the project came out of MIT and you have a @mit.edu address I would hope you would be able to count, are you in politics by chance? Peter ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Till Maas opensou...@till.name wrote: On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 02:53:45PM -0400, Scott Sullivan wrote: On 10/08/2012 02:35 PM, Till Maas wrote: Hi, On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 05:43:33AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: 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. I bought several Kirkwood devices with the expectation to run Fedora on them and would like to test it at least on a Seagate Dockstar, but the little instructions and installer support always scared me away. Till, I've recently updated the Fedora install instructions for the Pogoplug with is in the same family of devices and leverages the same uboot update process that dockstar does. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/PogoplugUSBDisk As long as uboot is configured correctly, the process is as simple as dd the image to a USB drive. It also includes instructions to update the boot loader and supports installing on USB, SD card and eSATA. The Fedora instructions only mention to dd an image on a SD card on the other hand. You'll note that it's not Debian directly providing that support or information. It's the Debian community and specifically one user. It is at least the documentation that is directly linked at http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ The same goes for Fedora, because of the man power requirements it is up to the community to support re-used consumer appliances like the Dockstar/Pogoplug. If you are successful in getting Fedora on your Dockstar, we would greatly appreciate a contribution of your experience and instructions on the wiki. It seems that the disk image boots on the dockstar, but a first yum update got oom-killed and there seems to be no swap and not LVM on the image to easily change this. IMHO a problem with the Fedora ARM documentation is, that it is only a collection of reports from people how they did it. It is lacking information about why something was done as described or how it should be done. For example the Debian documentation clearly states which uboot version is required and how to update it. The Kirkwood documentation in the Fedora ARM wiki only says that the proper uboot config depends on the uboot version and gives an example that is supposed to work on a Guru Plug Server Plus. Comparing it with the Debian documentation it also shows that different hex values (addresses?) are used in the uboot config for the kernel and initramfs. But why do they need to be different? Or do they not need to be different? Also as far as I can see there are no instructions about how the images are created and why they have been chosen the way they are (no LVM, no swap, device dependent names for kernel and initramfs, vfat for /boot). Well you could always step up to help improve that documentation rather than complain ;-) From my outsider POV the ARM SIG looks not very organised which makes it also hard to help now and then. For example I would more or less reduce the wiki install contents to the difference to the shown Debian documentation to avoid duplicate content and trust that they chose sane values, for example for the uboot version and the uboot config. But then it is unclear whether Fedora needs a different uboot config. It's not so much a lack of organisation but rather a lack of people to do things. There's about 6 of us that do things regularly and between us we might make up the equivalent of 1.5 full time people. Those of us that are actively working on it are having a hard time just keeping up with core tasks of building a some what working distro let alone producing a lovely working polished wiki with step by step howtos for the 100s of devices out there. We are well aware that there are issues with documentation and a whole lot of other things. We're working through things as time and materials are available. All help is welcome including improving the howtos and documentation on supporting each device. I would absolutely love someone with ideas on improving the way the wiki is laid out for things like device support howto to step up and implement the general layout framework with some place holders for various devices so interested people with those devices can add appropriate information. Regards, Peter Peter ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 El Tue, 9 Oct 2012 08:54:26 +0100 Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com escribió: On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Till Maas opensou...@till.name wrote: On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 02:53:45PM -0400, Scott Sullivan wrote: On 10/08/2012 02:35 PM, Till Maas wrote: Hi, On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 05:43:33AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: 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. I bought several Kirkwood devices with the expectation to run Fedora on them and would like to test it at least on a Seagate Dockstar, but the little instructions and installer support always scared me away. Till, I've recently updated the Fedora install instructions for the Pogoplug with is in the same family of devices and leverages the same uboot update process that dockstar does. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/PogoplugUSBDisk As long as uboot is configured correctly, the process is as simple as dd the image to a USB drive. It also includes instructions to update the boot loader and supports installing on USB, SD card and eSATA. The Fedora instructions only mention to dd an image on a SD card on the other hand. You'll note that it's not Debian directly providing that support or information. It's the Debian community and specifically one user. It is at least the documentation that is directly linked at http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ The same goes for Fedora, because of the man power requirements it is up to the community to support re-used consumer appliances like the Dockstar/Pogoplug. If you are successful in getting Fedora on your Dockstar, we would greatly appreciate a contribution of your experience and instructions on the wiki. It seems that the disk image boots on the dockstar, but a first yum update got oom-killed and there seems to be no swap and not LVM on the image to easily change this. IMHO a problem with the Fedora ARM documentation is, that it is only a collection of reports from people how they did it. It is lacking information about why something was done as described or how it should be done. For example the Debian documentation clearly states which uboot version is required and how to update it. The Kirkwood documentation in the Fedora ARM wiki only says that the proper uboot config depends on the uboot version and gives an example that is supposed to work on a Guru Plug Server Plus. Comparing it with the Debian documentation it also shows that different hex values (addresses?) are used in the uboot config for the kernel and initramfs. But why do they need to be different? Or do they not need to be different? Also as far as I can see there are no instructions about how the images are created and why they have been chosen the way they are (no LVM, no swap, device dependent names for kernel and initramfs, vfat for /boot). not that it will explain everything but Debian ships uboot for the kirkwood devices and add features not found in the stock uboot. ext2 support being one of them which is why /boot is vfat we support the stock uboot and only ship uboot where we have to preferring instead that the vendors be responsible for supporting and supplying uboot binaries. we are still evolving the image creation process. in f17 it was a shell script that used yum. we are moving to use kickstarts and anaconda via livemedia-creator Well you could always step up to help improve that documentation rather than complain ;-) From my outsider POV the ARM SIG looks not very organised which makes it also hard to help now and then. For example I would more or less reduce the wiki install contents to the difference to the shown Debian documentation to avoid duplicate content and trust that they chose sane values, for example for the uboot version and the uboot config. But then it is unclear whether Fedora needs a different uboot config. It's not so much a lack of organisation but rather a lack of people to do things. There's about 6 of us that do things regularly and between us we might make up the equivalent of 1.5 full time people. Those of us that are actively working on it are having a hard time just keeping up with core tasks of building a some what working distro let alone producing a lovely working polished wiki with step by step howtos for the 100s of devices out there. We are well aware that there are
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
Jon, Jon Masters j...@redhat.com writes: 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. All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too. I use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out if Fedora dropped support for them. I know a bunch of other people who have other kirkwood devices, too. I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??) The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort? Jon. -derek -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH warl...@mit.eduPGP key available ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Derek Atkins warl...@mit.edu wrote: Jon, Jon Masters j...@redhat.com writes: 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. All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too. I use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out if Fedora dropped support for them. I know a bunch of other people who have other kirkwood devices, too. If you read the full thread it's not about dropping the support in the short term. I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??) That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to single unit. The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort? It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort. Fedora no longer supports Pentium actually. It was dropped some time ago (around Fedora 12 from memory). The lowest level of support in Fedora for x86 is now Pentium Pro (Basically i586 + CMOV) which allows support for the OLPC XO-1 (AMD Geode Processor) and the only reason it's still at that level is because there's around 1.5 million XO-1 united deployed and still be actively used and upgraded to current Fedora releases (The just released 12.1.0 is based on Fedora 17, the under development 13.1.0 release is based on Fedora 18). I know mainline Fedora would like to drop the support for that too if they could. Peter ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Gordan Bobic gor...@bobich.net wrote: On 10/09/2012 03:48 PM, Peter Robinson wrote: The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort? It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort. Fedora no longer supports Pentium actually. It was dropped some time ago (around Fedora 12 from memory). F11 was the last version that supports i586. F12 is i686-only. The lowest level of support in Fedora for x86 is now Pentium Pro (Basically i586 + CMOV) which allows support for the OLPC XO-1 (AMD Geode Processor) and the only reason it's still at that level is because there's around 1.5 million XO-1 united deployed and still be actively used and upgraded to current Fedora releases (The just released 12.1.0 is based on Fedora 17, the under development 13.1.0 release is based on Fedora 18). I know mainline Fedora would like to drop the support for that too if they could. Might as well wait until the whole 32-bit branch can be dropped. Practically all x86 CPU made in most of the past decade is x86-64. Half decade maybe as Intel first introduced 64 bit CPUs in early 2005 and it took a while to spread through their product set, and there was a lot of Atom CPUs that weren't 64 bit capable. But I agree the reasons for 32 is slowly receding. Peter ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
Hi, On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 05:43:33AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: 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. I bought several Kirkwood devices with the expectation to run Fedora on them and would like to test it at least on a Seagate Dockstar, but the little instructions and installer support always scared me away. For example for Debian there are really good instructions to get the installer running: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/index.html It also includes instructions to update the boot loader and supports installing on USB, SD card and eSATA. The Fedora instructions only mention to dd an image on a SD card on the other hand.A Maybe Fedora ARM could reuse some of the information provided for Debian to ease installation of Fedora ARM as well. Regards Till ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/08/2012 02:35 PM, Till Maas wrote: Hi, On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 05:43:33AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: 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. I bought several Kirkwood devices with the expectation to run Fedora on them and would like to test it at least on a Seagate Dockstar, but the little instructions and installer support always scared me away. Till, I've recently updated the Fedora install instructions for the Pogoplug with is in the same family of devices and leverages the same uboot update process that dockstar does. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/PogoplugUSBDisk As long as uboot is configured correctly, the process is as simple as dd the image to a USB drive. It also includes instructions to update the boot loader and supports installing on USB, SD card and eSATA. The Fedora instructions only mention to dd an image on a SD card on the other hand. You'll note that it's not Debian directly providing that support or information. It's the Debian community and specifically one user. The same goes for Fedora, because of the man power requirements it is up to the community to support re-used consumer appliances like the Dockstar/Pogoplug. If you are successful in getting Fedora on your Dockstar, we would greatly appreciate a contribution of your experience and instructions on the wiki. Maybe Fedora ARM could reuse some of the information provided for Debian to ease installation of Fedora ARM as well. The page I listed above does. ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/08/2012 02:53 PM, Scott Sullivan wrote: On 10/08/2012 02:35 PM, Till Maas wrote: [...] It also includes instructions to update the boot loader and supports installing on USB, SD card and eSATA. The Fedora instructions only mention to dd an image on a SD card on the other hand. You'll note that it's not Debian directly providing that support or information. It's the Debian community and specifically one user. The same goes for Fedora, because of the man power requirements it is up to the community to support re-used consumer appliances like the Dockstar/Pogoplug. If you are successful in getting Fedora on your Dockstar, we would greatly appreciate a contribution of your experience and instructions on the wiki. I would like to correct one thing here. I make it sound like there is a distinction between Fedora Proper and the Fedora Community. There isn't one, there is simple a sliding scale of involvement with the community project that is Fedora. I'm merely trying to invite you to become more involved by contributing the very things you've identified as areas of improvement. Open Source rocks this way! -- Scott Sullivan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 02:53:45PM -0400, Scott Sullivan wrote: On 10/08/2012 02:35 PM, Till Maas wrote: Hi, On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 05:43:33AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: 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. I bought several Kirkwood devices with the expectation to run Fedora on them and would like to test it at least on a Seagate Dockstar, but the little instructions and installer support always scared me away. Till, I've recently updated the Fedora install instructions for the Pogoplug with is in the same family of devices and leverages the same uboot update process that dockstar does. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/PogoplugUSBDisk As long as uboot is configured correctly, the process is as simple as dd the image to a USB drive. It also includes instructions to update the boot loader and supports installing on USB, SD card and eSATA. The Fedora instructions only mention to dd an image on a SD card on the other hand. You'll note that it's not Debian directly providing that support or information. It's the Debian community and specifically one user. It is at least the documentation that is directly linked at http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ The same goes for Fedora, because of the man power requirements it is up to the community to support re-used consumer appliances like the Dockstar/Pogoplug. If you are successful in getting Fedora on your Dockstar, we would greatly appreciate a contribution of your experience and instructions on the wiki. It seems that the disk image boots on the dockstar, but a first yum update got oom-killed and there seems to be no swap and not LVM on the image to easily change this. IMHO a problem with the Fedora ARM documentation is, that it is only a collection of reports from people how they did it. It is lacking information about why something was done as described or how it should be done. For example the Debian documentation clearly states which uboot version is required and how to update it. The Kirkwood documentation in the Fedora ARM wiki only says that the proper uboot config depends on the uboot version and gives an example that is supposed to work on a Guru Plug Server Plus. Comparing it with the Debian documentation it also shows that different hex values (addresses?) are used in the uboot config for the kernel and initramfs. But why do they need to be different? Or do they not need to be different? Also as far as I can see there are no instructions about how the images are created and why they have been chosen the way they are (no LVM, no swap, device dependent names for kernel and initramfs, vfat for /boot). From my outsider POV the ARM SIG looks not very organised which makes it also hard to help now and then. For example I would more or less reduce the wiki install contents to the difference to the shown Debian documentation to avoid duplicate content and trust that they chose sane values, for example for the uboot version and the uboot config. But then it is unclear whether Fedora needs a different uboot config. Regards Till ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
Jon Masters wrote: Hi Folks, I'm interested to know who is using Kirkwood, and who would miss it if it went away. Just to get a rough gauge of interest, perhaps we should look at the download stats for the F17 images. That won't tell us the number of actual 'users', but will at least give us an idea of how many people even looked at Fedora on Kirkwood (and other platforms). Just a thought, d.marlin 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. Jon. ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
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 ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
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 :-) 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. From the last time it was looked at for the pre F-17 test images that weren't mirrored the kirkwood downloads were minuscule compared to most of the rest, I think in the 10s of downloads, I don't think they made it into the 100s. Mirrored specs for releases are harder to get. We can do the exercise again in the next week or so when F-18 images appear. Peter ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/06/2012 09:50 AM, Peter Robinson wrote: On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Jon Masters j...@redhat.com wrote: 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. Jon you have such a terrible way with words! To explain what I believe Jon is trying to say a little better let me outline my thoughts. snip v5, etc. To be clear, I was also thinking about v5 longer term (as everyone is I'm sure) but no, all I meant in the above was Kirkwood in particular. I'm genuinely curious who relies on it now and who will test it. My terrible way with words probably relates to the bit about *not* killing off v5, which I added only to offset anyone thinking I was suggesting something more than just trying to understand who needs Kirkwood to work. If the only official v5 target were an emulation platform for example, that would give a kernel but would be easier for anyone to test if it turns out Kirkwood doesn't have enough testers. But, apologies for the wording. Jon. ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 06/10/2012 15:02, Peter Robinson wrote: On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Gordan Bobicgor...@bobich.net 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. I doubt that. If your talking in purely terms of plug machines that's possibly the case but I bet there's probably more ARM based XOs out there now than all the Plug devices in the context of people that actually want to run Fedora or other generic distros on them. I'm not so sure about that, certainly not in terms of the ones available to buy off the shelf in quantities of 1. Or at least I've not found it to be the case. Where can I buy one? They also don't seem to have a meaningful price point advantage over the likes of Genesi Efika MX Smartbook or the Toshiba AC100. 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. 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. I think that devices like the Mele A1000 and other such devices are more interesting and a lot more capable for the average user that wants to use Fedora on their device. I'm well aware of the Mele A1000 and the EOMA68 based laptops also based on the Allwinner A10 that are supposedly about to becoming available fairly imminently, but that doesn't change the sheer number of Sheeva/Guru/Dream plugs out there at the moment. Gordan ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
Re: [fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?
On 10/06/2012 06:50 AM, Peter Robinson wrote: Of course none of this is set in stone, it's a discussion and just me putting my ideas into words. FWIW, I likewise think we should shoot for promotion of armv7hl to primary, leaving armv5 (or armv6) secondary. Numerous packages with atomics issues magically begin working this way. Additionally, in the timeframe we're talking about v7 is going to be the overwhelming majority of systems out there. One extra thought: If we move from armv5tel to armv6hl for the Pi's sake, there's still a big gain: A single koji builder can be used for both armv7hl and armv6hl builds. Supporting armv5tel means we need to provide separate builders for the alternate ABI, raising the overall number of builders required. -- Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / b...@redhat.com ___ arm mailing list arm@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
