[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Jon Masters]

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.

> 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.

> 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? :) 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.

Jon.