[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Gordan Bobic]

On 06/10/2012 15:02, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Gordan Bobic<gordan at 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