[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Gordan Bobic]

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