[fedora-arm] Fedora 20 for Raspberry Pi????

[Gordan Bobic]

On 23/12/2013 21:12, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 11:51:13AM -0600, Jon wrote:
>> To make a comparison:
>>
>> * Fedora does not offer support for older i486 processors.
>> * The Raspberry Pi is like that, using an old (out dated) ARMv6 CPU.
>>
>> Hope that helps clarify.
>> Raspberry PI are based on obsolete technology.
>
> The RPi works fine for many people.  2.3 million have been sold.
>
> I think we should be honest about the real reason: Either we have to
> maintain two sets of packages or we have to make everyone on the newer
> and faster armv7 suffer with unoptimized binaries, and we don't want
> to do either of those things.

 From what I recall, significant difference in performance for 99% of 
applications in a typical Linux distro (desktop or server) between 
armv5tel and armv7hl has been debunked plenty of times. Yes, there are a 
handful of applications that benefit, but they are relatively few and 
generally limited to multimedia and gaming tasks, i.e. things that ARM 
is not really ideally suited for yet anyway.

 From what I can tell the much bigger obstacle to supporting older ARM 
platforms is two fold - few upstream developers care about ARM, and even 
fewer care about their code even compiling on older ARM targets (e.g. 
(but not limited to) a large number of packages make little or no effort 
to ensure memory accesses are aligned - including the likes of 
e2fsprogs, and transparent alignment fixup in hardware is only available 
on armv7 and later).

The problem is upstream of the distro, IMO.

Gordan