>> That /may/ be true. Maybe. I don't know that for sure. They certainly >> were popular amongst a certain crowd. I would say the most popular board >> these days is likely the rPi, followed by some of the new v7 devices, >> especially the cheaper rPi-inspired AllWinner based stuff, which we >> probably need to look into supporting more officially. > > > In terms of new purchases - maybe. But in terms of what's actually out there > in people's hands already at the moment, I think Kirkwoods are much more > numerous. Pi and the Via APC suffer from the lack of RAM, which makes > Kirkwoods with more than double the usable RAM rather appealing on the > price/performance tradeoff. In people's hands the RPi would win hands down. There's well over a quarter of a million of them out there. And while I agree the RPi suffers from a lack of RAM there's a lot of cheap ARMv7 devices appearing now with 1Gb of RAM and a lot higher specs than either the RPi or any kirkwood based device for well less than $100. In the case of the Cubieboard it will be $15 more for 4 times the RAM and a lot of extra features like SATA. >>> Personally I don't really care if you drop the kernel support for them >>> in latest Fedora because I build my own kernels anyway, but I suspect >>> that opinions on this list may not be representative - membership of >>> this list is likely to be skewed toward the developer audience rather >>> than the users who expect to just dump the image on the SD card and use >>> the device. >> >> >> Sure. But then, this is a volunteer community and we're short on >> resources. We want to ultimately have a Fedora ARM kernel maintainer but >> we're not there yet. And it would be better to support a small number of >> devices well - and allow others to do their own thing - than try to be >> all things to all people. That isn't going to scale well. One day, we'll >> all be using v8 devices with a unified kernel, but not yet. > > > The other thing that may be worth assessing is the user experience with > various devices. My experience is that the UX with < 200MB of RAM and GUI > use with modern distributions is... unpleasant. > > >>> Perhaps when SheevaPlug and DreamPlug are no longer available to buy >>> new, it might be OK to drop Kirkwood support, but I'd be weary of losing >>> it before then. >> >> >> Are you volunteering to support them? :) > > > Sure, but only for the EL6 based kernels, not the new Fedora ones. :) So in fact your not volunteering to do anything other than offer your opinion :-) >> Joking aside, I ask because >> from where I'm sitting (well, lying down, it's 6am) there isn't a lot of >> testing happening on the plugs right now, few people if any are running >> F18 kernels on them and giving feedback, etc. So maybe you are the more >> typical user there - someone who is going to build their own kernel >> anyway and just wants a v5 userspace they can pick up. > > > Are there statistics available for the download counts for different SoC > kernels? That might give a reasonable indication of how popular various SoCs > are with Fedora users. >From the last time it was looked at for the pre F-17 test images that weren't mirrored the kirkwood downloads were minuscule compared to most of the rest, I think in the 10s of downloads, I don't think they made it into the 100s. Mirrored specs for releases are harder to get. We can do the exercise again in the next week or so when F-18 images appear. Peter _______________________________________________ arm mailing list arm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
