On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 02:15:49PM -0500, Ben Cotton wrote:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RetireARMv7
== Owner ==
* Name: [[User:pbrobinson| Peter Robinson]]
* Email: <pbrobinson(a)fedoraproject.org>
== Detailed Description ==
The ARMv7 arm architecture was the second variant of the arm
architecture that Fedora has supported, the first was ARMv5, the third
is aarch64. The proposal is to retire ARMv7 as part of the Fedora 37
release. This will allow ARMv7/armhfp to be supported until the Fedora
36 end of life in around June 2023.
Overall arm32 is generally waning with generally few new ARMv7 devices
added to Fedora in recent releases. To add to that a number of newer
Fedora features designed to improve speed and security of the Fedora
release are causing 32 bit architectures in general primarily due to
"issues" or "problems" seems to be missing in this sentence.
the process memory limit when linking large applications. The
ARMv7/armhfp is the last fully supported 32 bit architecture, we still
currently build i686 packages, but it's not shipped as artefacts.
"it's" → "they are"?
== User Experience ==
Any current users of Fedora on ARMv7 devices won't be able to upgrade
to Fedora 37, they will have to stay on Fedora 36 until it's EOL.
Please add "and will have to retire the hardware or move to a different
distribution afterwards". Explicit is good.
== Release Notes ==
Fedora Linux 37 with the ARMv7 architecture is retired into the
sunset. There will definitely be celebrations, there will likely be
some that shed some tears! Overall for the maintainers it will likely
be seen as a net win, for the few, generally shrinking, users it's
probably a net loss but they can probably just go and buy a Raspberry
Pi Zero 2W for US$15. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Based on the countme graphs that mattdm has been showing, the fraction
on arm32 systems is very very small. And arm32 has been a drag on
maintainer resources, with the slow builds and timeouts. Dropping the
arch will not be without some pain for the people using those boards,
but I think it's the right thing to do for the distro. And the whole
thing will happen more then a year from now, and by that time the
number of those arm32 boards will be even lower.
Zbyszek