[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Till Maas <opensource at till.name> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 02:53:45PM -0400, Scott Sullivan wrote:
>> On 10/08/2012 02:35 PM, Till Maas wrote:
>> >Hi,
>> >
>> >On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 05:43:33AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
>> >
>> >>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.
>> >
>> >I bought several Kirkwood devices with the expectation to run Fedora on
>> >them and would like to test it at least on a Seagate Dockstar, but the
>> >little instructions and installer support always scared me away.
>>
>> Till,
>>
>> I've recently updated the Fedora install instructions for the
>> Pogoplug with is in the same family of devices and leverages the
>> same uboot update process that dockstar does.
>>
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/PogoplugUSBDisk
>>
>> As long as uboot is configured correctly, the process is as simple
>> as dd the image to a USB drive.
>>
>> >
>> >It also includes instructions to update the boot loader and supports
>> >installing on USB, SD card and eSATA. The Fedora instructions only
>> >mention to dd an image on a SD card on the other hand.
>>
>> You'll note that it's not Debian directly providing that support or
>> information. It's the Debian community and specifically one user.
>
> It is at least the documentation that is directly linked at
> http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
>
>> The same goes for Fedora, because of the man power requirements it
>> is up to the community to support re-used consumer appliances like
>> the Dockstar/Pogoplug. If you are successful in getting Fedora on
>> your Dockstar, we would greatly appreciate a contribution of your
>> experience and instructions on the wiki.
>
> It seems that the disk image boots on the dockstar, but a first "yum
> update" got oom-killed and there seems to be no swap and not LVM on the
> image to easily change this. IMHO a problem with the Fedora ARM
> documentation is, that it is only a collection of reports from people
> how they did it. It is lacking information about why something was done
> as described or how it should be done. For example the Debian
> documentation clearly states which uboot version is required and how to
> update it. The Kirkwood documentation in the Fedora ARM wiki only says
> that the proper uboot config depends on the uboot version and gives an
> example that is supposed to work on a Guru Plug Server Plus.
> Comparing it with the Debian documentation it also shows that different
> hex values (addresses?) are used in the uboot config for the kernel and
> initramfs. But why do they need to be different? Or do they not need to
> be different? Also as far as I can see there are no instructions about
> how the images are created and why they have been chosen the way they
> are (no LVM, no swap, device dependent names for kernel and initramfs,
> vfat for /boot).

Well you could always step up to help improve that documentation
rather than complain ;-)

> From my outsider POV the ARM SIG looks not very organised which makes it
> also hard to help now and then. For example I would more or less reduce
> the wiki install contents to the difference to the shown Debian
> documentation to avoid duplicate content and trust that they chose sane
> values, for example for the uboot version and the uboot config. But then
> it is unclear whether Fedora needs a different uboot config.

It's not so much a lack of organisation but rather a lack of people to
do things. There's about 6 of us that do things regularly and between
us we might make up the equivalent of 1.5 full time people.

Those of us that are actively working on it are having a hard time
just keeping up with core tasks of building a some what working distro
let alone producing a lovely working polished wiki with step by step
howtos for the 100s of devices out there.

We are well aware that there are issues with documentation and a whole
lot of other things. We're working through things as time and
materials are available. All help is welcome including improving the
howtos and documentation on supporting each device. I would absolutely
love someone with ideas on improving the way the wiki is laid out for
things like device support howto  to step up and implement the general
layout framework with some place holders for various devices so
interested people with those devices can add appropriate information.

Regards,
Peter

Peter