[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> 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.

The original question posed by John has sort of been muted. His
original intention was asking about testing and blocking of releases
based on kirkwood. The fact was that kirkwood isn't a release blocker
and issues can be fixed later. It actual fact it read completely
differently so I added confusion to the thread.

And remain where? In secondary arch... sure.

>>> 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?

Marvell? Asking who in particular? And what configuration. There's a
lot of kirkwood chips with 128Mb or less RAM which makes it a little
pointless for a Fedora image and hence IMO not relevant.

>>> 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?

It takes a lot of my time to maintain packages that build on armv5,
whether it be chasing upstream maintainers to fix breakages (see the
issues with glibc on rawhide as a recent example), dealing with
packages that use atomics which armv5 doesn't support. Attempting to
beg people to test rawhide releases to ensure the HW does actually
work with the releases before we hit final because I don't have HW and
personally don't have the time to do so even if I had the HW.

>> 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...

No. The XO-1 was released in 2007. That's half a decade ago. Given the
project came out of MIT and you have a @mit.edu address I would hope
you would be able to count, are you in politics by chance?

Peter