[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
> 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.

I've never said 192Mb of RAM is reasonable so I think you'll find I'm
completely serious, but then neither is 512Mb. With devices like the
cubieboard, gooseberry, wandboard and numerous others coming out with
1Gb of RAM I personally don't see the kirkwood nor the RPi as any for
of serious. What's more the cubieboard will be only $14 more than the
RPi.

>>>> 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.

I don't have 2 days to spare to deal with that. If someone else does
that is absolutely fabulous. I'm yet to see them actually step up to
the plate and do the work. Clearly you're not interested in doing any
work what so ever, I've not actually seen a contribution from you at
all.

>>> 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.

You've made that point and the point that I've made numerous times is
the decision isn't being made today so it's somewhat of a mute point.

Peter