[fedora-arm] Cheap ARM devices

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Chris Tyler <chris at tylers.info> wrote:

> On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 12:04 -0600, Adam Miller wrote:
> > RAM is a really good point, I think it will be in the ballpark of 256
> > (plus or minus a bit). Also, I'd like to open up the conversation
> > about version of ARM we as a SIG want to support as the efforts start
> > to ramp up while targeting popular devices. I think ARMv9 might be a
> > little too aggressive but are there any devices that are still
> > prominent that are ARMv5? Would it be possible (or even feasible) to
> > maintain ARMv5, ARMv7, and ARMv9 in parallel and treat them as
> > separate architectures?
>
> The ARM "Family" vs. "Architecture" numbering is wonky (and very
> frustrating - larger numbers don't reliably mean newer, bigger, faster,
> or better). The SheevaPlug uses an "ARM9E" family chip, which uses the
> "ARMv5TEJ" architecture. ARMv5 is a needed current target for that
> device and others.
>
> However, the popular Cortex chips use ARMv6M and ARMx7* architecture. Is
> there enough performance difference to warrant targeting both
> independently? And just the kernel, or userspace as well?
>
>
I'd been pondering Adam's exact question. It seems that Ubuntu (not that we
should or need to follow what they do) decided upon supporting ARMv7 and
later at their UDS [1]. There's also some other points here [2]. They also
discussed a number of other worthwhile points to do with device trees and
bootloaders which I presume are all relevant for discussions about support
of Fedora on ARM platforms. But generally I've ignorant about the pros and
cons of supporting the different artchitectures and I know there's
discussion over THUMB vs no THUMB compile options as well.

Peter

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/364654/
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mobile/ARMv7AndThumb
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