On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Jon Masters <jcm@xxxxxxxxxx> 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. Jon you have such a terrible way with words! To explain what I believe Jon is trying to say a little better let me outline my thoughts. ARMv5 as a chip is going away, ARM is actively moving customers (their customers not end users) to other ARMv7 based chips such as the Cortex-A5 and A7 that have better performance and use let power for similar costs. I don't believe there will be new products on ARMv5 by the new year. There's a lot of interesting new boards appearing on the market at a less than $100 price point such as the A10 based Cubieboard [1] at $49 that has a 1gb of RAM and 1ghz Cortex-A8 chipset with things like real SATA. There's also devices like the Wandboard [2] which gets you a dual core A9 processor with 1gb of RAM for $89 So my thoughts have been what to do with armv5tel support, we're certainly not going to tear it out. With Seneca moving to do a bringup for the armv6hl architecture for the likes of the Pi there will be a lot less users of armv5tel and the actual users of it other than the Pi are low. So my thoughts are that when we move to primary architecture that only ARMv7 gets promoted. I believe this is best for the movement of ARM in Fedora in general. Even just the promotion to primary cause some heated discussion and I strongly suspect the release of Fedora that will end up being the release that we push to primary will be Fedora 20. F-19 is already well underway and I believe we need to enable a new arch at the point where the previous release branches which means F-20 is out next opportunity. That means we need to look at what will be on the market in 12 months time and I don't think ARMv5 will be on the shopping list. We merge the armv5tel koji infrastructure with that of the v6hl and it remains as a secondary arch and continues as it is if those people that are interested in it step up to maintain it. I will personally continue to assist to ensure packages don't fail etc. Seneca have provided a solid and stable infrastructure and they use the architectures as a core component of their various courses and it provides their students a fabulous learning environment for getting into different platforms to x86 and to learn how to build and OS from the ground up! Of course none of this is set in stone, it's a discussion and just me putting my ideas into words. Peter [1] http://cubieboard.org [2] http://www.wandboard.org/ _______________________________________________ arm mailing list arm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
