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.
2. The different ABI requires as much as 2 times the number of build hosts to support both hard and soft float ABIs.
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.
4. The contributors who do most of the Fedora ARM work are focused specifically on armv7, so the energy spent fixing armv5 specific build problems is time taken away from their interest.
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.
Where does this leave us? Dropping armv5tel anytime soon isn't being proposed- we'll certainly do F18. Probably F19, too (We're already building for it). But when we do logistics for moving koji services to PHX, most of the interested parties are thinking of just moving armv7hl. The armv5tel builds can continue as they are, assuming Seneca wants to continue hosting them. We're all volunteers here, so if you want to volunteer some time to keep armv5tel viable please do! Nothing is written in stone or decided, but now is definitely the time to have the conversation.
-- Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc@xxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ arm mailing list arm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
