[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Derek Atkins]

Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
>> Jon,
>>
>> Jon Masters <jcm at redhat.com> writes:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug
>> devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too.  I
>> use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out
>> if Fedora dropped support for them.  I know a bunch of other people who
>> have other kirkwood devices, too.
>
> If you read the full thread it's not about dropping the support in the
> short term.

I did read the thread, but our definitions of "short term" appear to be
different.  The thread appeared to be a question of support for F18 or
F19.  IMNSHO I feel Kirkwood support should probably remain until, oh,
F25 or 26, at a minimum.  There are just too many (IMHO) Kirkwoods out
in production.

>> I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to
>> acquire.  (Limit 1, then wait a few months??)
>
> That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be
> relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to
> single unit.

Glad to hear that.  However I'm loathe to throw away my investment of
Kirkwoods.  I cannot answer you how many others bought them.  Have you
tried asking them for approximate numbers?

>> The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop
>> support for kirkwood.  Is it really that much extra effort?
>
> It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort.

Oh?  Could you elaborate on that?  What "quite a lot of effort" does it
take?

> Fedora no longer supports Pentium actually. It was dropped some time
> ago (around Fedora 12 from memory). The lowest level of support in
> Fedora for x86 is now Pentium Pro (Basically i586 + CMOV) which allows
> support for the OLPC XO-1 (AMD Geode Processor) and the only reason
> it's still at that level is because there's around 1.5 million XO-1
> united deployed and still be actively used and upgraded to current
> Fedora releases (The just released 12.1.0 is based on Fedora 17, the
> under development 13.1.0 release is based on Fedora 18). I know
> mainline Fedora would like to drop the support for that too if they
> could.

So what you're saying is that Fedora *still* supports an x32 CPU that
was released well over a decade ago...

> Peter

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available