[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Gordan Bobic]

On 10/11/2012 10:51 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
> 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.

Two points:
1) If that's what you think, I'd really like to stop seeing the Pi as an 
excuse for dropping or including anything and pandering to it.
2) 500MB-ish of RAM is actually enough for a decent user experience. I 
am a daily user of a Toshiba AC100, and use it daily with KDE as my 
desktop environment and Firefox as my browser. With 480MB of RAM, the 
experience is comfortable. With a few tweaks the experience stretches to 
pleasant:
http://www.altechnative.net/2012/01/04/alleviating-memory-pressure-on-toshiba-ac100/

>>>>> 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.

I've had an issue with the attitude for pursuing the bleeding edge in 
Fedora for a while - that's why I decided to roll a different distribution.

When most of your bug reports expire due to the release running EOL it 
rather puts a downer on the motivation to bother contributing with the 
goal posts moving so fast at the expense of stability.

Gordan