[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Peter Robinson]

>> 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 :-)

>> Joking aside, I ask because
>> from where I'm sitting (well, lying down, it's 6am) there isn't a lot of
>> testing happening on the plugs right now, few people if any are running
>> F18 kernels on them and giving feedback, etc. So maybe you are the more
>> typical user there - someone who is going to build their own kernel
>> anyway and just wants a v5 userspace they can pick up.
>
>
> Are there statistics available for the download counts for different SoC
> kernels? That might give a reasonable indication of how popular various SoCs
> are with Fedora users.