[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
> On 10/11/2012 10:51 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Gordan Bobic<gordan at bobich.net>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10/10/2012 05:55 PM, Derek Atkins 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.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> More to the point, they are still being made and sold in reasonable
>>> quantity.
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> 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?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 512MB of usable RAM on a SheevaPlug is also a lot easier to live with
>>> than
>>> 192MB of usable RAM on the Pi.
>>>
>>> If the VIA APC was cited as an alternative, then maybe I could almost get
>>> behind that in due course (512MB of RAM, *TX form factor). But running
>>> one
>>> of the default desktop environments with a browser that actually works
>>> reasonably well for most commonly used websites (i.e. not Midori) in
>>> 192MB
>>> of RAM? While swapping to an average SD card? Do be serious.
>>
>>
>> I've never said 192Mb of RAM is reasonable so I think you'll find I'm
>> completely serious, but then neither is 512Mb. With devices like the
>> cubieboard, gooseberry, wandboard and numerous others coming out with
>> 1Gb of RAM I personally don't see the kirkwood nor the RPi as any for
>> of serious. What's more the cubieboard will be only $14 more than the
>> RPi.
>
>
> Two points:
> 1) If that's what you think, I'd really like to stop seeing the Pi as an
> excuse for dropping or including anything and pandering to it.

Believe me I'm not pandering to the RPi _AT_ALL_ so again your point
is completely boundless and useless.

> 2) 500MB-ish of RAM is actually enough for a decent user experience. I am a
> daily user of a Toshiba AC100, and use it daily with KDE as my desktop
> environment and Firefox as my browser. With 480MB of RAM, the experience is
> comfortable. With a few tweaks the experience stretches to pleasant:
> http://www.altechnative.net/2012/01/04/alleviating-memory-pressure-on-toshiba-ac100/

Great! We're not talking about dropping support for the AC100. I have
one as well that one day I'll get the time to configure to my liking.

>
>>>>>> 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?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  From my experience of rolling a similar distribution, if the kernel code
>>> works as it's supposed to, a day or so of tweaking the configs, followed
>>> by
>>> about a day of compiling (in a 1.2GHz Kirkwood).
>>>
>>> If there are issues? Much longer because the compile takes so long.bich.net> wrote:
> On 10/11/2012 10:51 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>
>>
>> I don't have 2 days to spare to deal with that. If someone else does
>> that is absolutely fabulous. I'm yet to see them actually step up to
>> the plate and do the work. Clearly you're not interested in doing any
>> work what so ever, I've not actually seen a contribution from you at
>> all.
>
>
> I've had an issue with the attitude for pursuing the bleeding edge in Fedora
> for a while - that's why I decided to roll a different distribution.

That's fine, you're free to take your toys along with your opinions
and play in what ever sand pit you wish.

> When most of your bug reports expire due to the release running EOL it
> rather puts a downer on the motivation to bother contributing with the goal
> posts moving so fast at the expense of stability.

Do your bugs get fixed any quicker in your sandpit? No, unless you fix
them yourself. Same outcome really!