[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Gordan Bobic]

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.

>>> 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.

>> 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.
>
> So what you're saying is that Fedora *still* supports an x32 CPU that
> was released well over a decade ago...

The important point to be made is that both Kirkwood and i686 class 
machines are still in production and available to buy new today.

Gordan