Re: ARMv4-support in armel/squeeze?
Thanks for your detailled answer.
Wookey wrote...
> arm will stay around for
> another 18 months or so as 'oldstable', and then v4 machines will be
> pretty-much unsupported in Debian unless someone steps up to support
> them.
Do I hear a call for volunteers?
> This is unfortunate for people still running v4 hardware (strongarm,
> pretty much - do have something else which is v4?), but continuing to
> support v4 hardware imposes significant overhead on people running
> later hardware. There is plenty of pressure to move to v5-or-later
> (i.e. drop v4t too). Ubuntu has already moved to v7 or later only.
Do I understand correctly the main reason for dropping arm is lack of
manpower to support several flavours of ARM, while the toolchain and
things like that are still in good shape?
> Debian has always tried hard to support as much hardware as possible,
> but it does (often, and in this case) affect newer hardware so at some
> point one has to let hardware drop off the bottom.
FWIW, my box is a "Raidsonic NAS IB-4220-B" (machtype 2038, FA526 CPU,
StromARM if I read /proc/cpuinfo and Wikipedia right), and support is
just about to enter the kernel. These machines were sold at least
until two years ago, this is a rather short time compared to some
15-year-old pentiums that are still supported in i386 and will be for
a long time.
> It's very difficult to support people with reliable old Netwinders at
> one end, and others who want to use all the shiny stuff on their new
> arm netbooks/tablets at the other witout building 6 different arm
> distros. What an appropriate compromise is, is currently a hot topic.
Um, really six (the ARM world is new to me so I might miss irony)?
Just to improve my understanding, how bad was the impact of a
hypothetical "armv4" architecture on ARMv4t, i.e. without thumb
support?
What I'd like to see is continued support for my hardware. Not the
full project of course, but those somewhat 300 packages that make up a
typical installation for a NAS box. Now that I see Debian will not
provide it, I can - and probably will - do that for myself, but I'd
take the opportuniy to switch to EABI. If there's broader interest for
an "armv4eabi" architecture, this should be done in a way other people
can use it, too (and I'd need a lot more knowledge about toolchains,
buildds and the like, then).
Regards,
Christoph
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