[fedora-arm] Who's using Kirkwood?

[Gordan Bobic]

On 10/10/2012 07:59 PM, Brendan Conoboy wrote:
> On 10/10/2012 10:47 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> Sure, but we're a decade later. Kirkwood devices were just released
>> what? 3 years ago? I certainly got mine more recently than that. I
>> admit I've been running F12 on it, but that's only because there hadn't
>> been another fedora release until F17.
>
> The comparison to i686 isn't really very apt. Kirkwood is more like
> i386, but even that's stretching the simile. There several problems with
> armv5tel support over the long term.
>
> 1. It's not self hosting. We have to use armv7 hosts to build most of
> the armv5 packages because only they have enough RAM, enough CPU time,
> fast enough swap. Building UP packages on SMP systems causes issues for
> a number of multithreaded packages. Transient failures, "bugs" that
> aren't really bugs, just packages written in the belief that armv5 code
> will be built and run on armv5 hosts. This problem gets worse with every
> release.

Just out of interest, which packages are you referring to? I am assuming 
it is LibreOffice + a small subset of whatever is in Fedora that isn't 
in EL; mainly because I had no RAM/swap/CPU issues building any the 2000 
or so packages that overlap. Takes about 3-4 weeks on a _single_ SheevaPlug.

> 3. Certain features such as atomic operations aren't available on armv5,
> reducing the number of packages that can be built for ARM in total: If
> it fails on armv5 but works on armv7, we still don't get it for armv7.

In _most_ packages that require this, there are patches that address it.

> 5. On the whole, it's not a popular Fedora ARM target. Raspberry pi,
> OMAP, highbank, this is where most (not all) of our known users have
> hardware and interest. There are some Kirkwood users, clearly, but there
> are a lot more users of everything else. We should get some updated
> download stats on this to demonstrate, but last I saw kirkwood was maybe
> 3% of usage.

Perhaps a poll might be a good way to ascertain this, rather than a 
discussion?

Gordan