On 23/12/2013 21:12, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 11:51:13AM -0600, Jon wrote:
To make a comparison:
* Fedora does not offer support for older i486 processors.
* The Raspberry Pi is like that, using an old (out dated) ARMv6 CPU.
Hope that helps clarify.
Raspberry PI are based on obsolete technology.
The RPi works fine for many people. 2.3 million have been sold.
I think we should be honest about the real reason: Either we have to
maintain two sets of packages or we have to make everyone on the newer
and faster armv7 suffer with unoptimized binaries, and we don't want
to do either of those things.
From what I recall, significant difference in performance for 99% of
applications in a typical Linux distro (desktop or server) between
armv5tel and armv7hl has been debunked plenty of times. Yes, there are a
handful of applications that benefit, but they are relatively few and
generally limited to multimedia and gaming tasks, i.e. things that ARM
is not really ideally suited for yet anyway.
From what I can tell the much bigger obstacle to supporting older ARM
platforms is two fold - few upstream developers care about ARM, and even
fewer care about their code even compiling on older ARM targets (e.g.
(but not limited to) a large number of packages make little or no effort
to ensure memory accesses are aligned - including the likes of
e2fsprogs, and transparent alignment fixup in hardware is only available
on armv7 and later).
The problem is upstream of the distro, IMO.
Gordan
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