[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Peter Robinson]

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 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.

> 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.

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.

Peter