Re: ARM port(s) BoF at DebConf
On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 09:21:59PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Right. I've asked before who's still using v4t machines, and the
> common response is "just openmoko". Thanks for mentioning others.
>
> We've been pestered several times by toolchain developers and
> upstreams for various other projects that generate code for ARM
> (e.g. JITs in browsers). It seems that Debian is about the only place
> where anybody still cares about v4t any more, so we'll be the only
> people seeing bugs related to broken (or even missing) v4 support
> now.
>
> Even Debian moves on, dropping support for older platforms from time
> to time. We don't support actual i386 hardware any more, for example.
I remember Debian had a kernel patch to try and keep i386 going even
after glibc wanted to move to i486+ only. So it was not by choice that
Debian dropped i386. The lack of the atomic swap instruction seems to
be what killed i386 support.
> I've asked people for benchmarks to show the improvements (or lack of
> them) that might come from a move to v5te. If there isn't a compelling
> case for moving, we won't!
Certainly no one seems able to state that there is any real advantage
to v5te over v4.
I don't have any v4 hardware myself, but I do sometimes play with v5te
hardware, but mainly I care about the armhf on v7. I don't like to see
old hardware die without good cause though.
--
Len Sorensen
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