On 10/11/2012 10:51 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Gordan Bobic<gordan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 10/10/2012 05:55 PM, Derek Atkins 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.
All my Arm devices are Kirkwoods, including Sheeva and Guru Plug
devices, and I was considering acquiring some Dreamplug devices, too. I
use them in production (with Fedora), and honestly I'd feel very put out
if Fedora dropped support for them. I know a bunch of other people who
have other kirkwood devices, too.
If you read the full thread it's not about dropping the support in the
short term.
I did read the thread, but our definitions of "short term" appear to be
different. The thread appeared to be a question of support for F18 or
F19. IMNSHO I feel Kirkwood support should probably remain until, oh,
F25 or 26, at a minimum. There are just too many (IMHO) Kirkwoods out
in production.
More to the point, they are still being made and sold in reasonable
quantity.
I know that RPi looks interesting, but they are still very hard to
acquire. (Limit 1, then wait a few months??)
That's no longer the case. In most cases I believe it should now be
relatively instant shipping and they're certainly no longer limited to
single unit.
Glad to hear that. However I'm loathe to throw away my investment of
Kirkwoods. I cannot answer you how many others bought them. Have you
tried asking them for approximate numbers?
512MB of usable RAM on a SheevaPlug is also a lot easier to live with than
192MB of usable RAM on the Pi.
If the VIA APC was cited as an alternative, then maybe I could almost get
behind that in due course (512MB of RAM, *TX form factor). But running one
of the default desktop environments with a browser that actually works
reasonably well for most commonly used websites (i.e. not Midori) in 192MB
of RAM? While swapping to an average SD card? Do be serious.
I've never said 192Mb of RAM is reasonable so I think you'll find I'm
completely serious, but then neither is 512Mb. With devices like the
cubieboard, gooseberry, wandboard and numerous others coming out with
1Gb of RAM I personally don't see the kirkwood nor the RPi as any for
of serious. What's more the cubieboard will be only $14 more than the
RPi.
Two points:
1) If that's what you think, I'd really like to stop seeing the Pi as an
excuse for dropping or including anything and pandering to it.
2) 500MB-ish of RAM is actually enough for a decent user experience. I
am a daily user of a Toshiba AC100, and use it daily with KDE as my
desktop environment and Firefox as my browser. With 480MB of RAM, the
experience is comfortable. With a few tweaks the experience stretches to
pleasant:
http://www.altechnative.net/2012/01/04/alleviating-memory-pressure-on-toshiba-ac100/
The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop
support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort?
It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort.
Oh? Could you elaborate on that? What "quite a lot of effort" does it
take?
From my experience of rolling a similar distribution, if the kernel code
works as it's supposed to, a day or so of tweaking the configs, followed by
about a day of compiling (in a 1.2GHz Kirkwood).
If there are issues? Much longer because the compile takes so long.
I don't have 2 days to spare to deal with that. If someone else does
that is absolutely fabulous. I'm yet to see them actually step up to
the plate and do the work. Clearly you're not interested in doing any
work what so ever, I've not actually seen a contribution from you at
all.
I've had an issue with the attitude for pursuing the bleeding edge in
Fedora for a while - that's why I decided to roll a different distribution.
When most of your bug reports expire due to the release running EOL it
rather puts a downer on the motivation to bother contributing with the
goal posts moving so fast at the expense of stability.
Gordan
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