[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Gordan Bobic]

On 06/10/2012 15:11, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>> 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 :-)

Perhaps. But distro-wise, at least I have a readily available 
alternative to Fedora for people who want to stick with Kirkwoods. :)

Gordan