On 10/10/2012 07:59 PM, Brendan Conoboy wrote:
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.
Just out of interest, which packages are you referring to? I am assuming
it is LibreOffice + a small subset of whatever is in Fedora that isn't
in EL; mainly because I had no RAM/swap/CPU issues building any the 2000
or so packages that overlap. Takes about 3-4 weeks on a _single_ SheevaPlug.
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.
In _most_ packages that require this, there are patches that address it.
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.
Perhaps a poll might be a good way to ascertain this, rather than a
discussion?
Gordan
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