Re: Summary of the ARM ports BoF at DC15
On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 5:58 PM, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
>
> Summary: if people care about armel for Stretch, they should make
> noise NOW and convince people it's needed and can/should be supported
> in future.
>
I'm running Debian on QNAP TS-212P that was purchased new three months
ago. I recommended one to a friend who's been looking for a cheap
commodity NAS just the other week.
I think Debian provides a very valuable service here - it enables
people to easily replace the typical proprietary NAS software (often
with ancient kernels, huge attack surface, spotty security updates and
uncertain life cycles) with a Free alternative that gives them control
over their own hardware. It also gives manufacturers incentive to keep
their hardware easy to hack on (SSH root access, enough flash,
soldered serial headers) as some people choose QNAP over e.g. Synology
just because they can easily put Debian on it -- with the Debian
Installer a careful individual doesn't even need serial access!
The architecture may be a bit dated but it can still push a lot of
packets over a gigabit cable and it's far from being dead - the recent
DTB transition and 4.x kernels brought new features to kirkwood
(cpuidle driver, working cpufreq, thermal zone support), bugs are
being ironed out with upstream (coherency issue with syncbarriers a
while back, IO problems with mtdblock driver investigated currently)
and there is a brand-new rewrite of the crypto engine driver
(marvell-cesa) in kernel 4.2 that I am very eager to test as soon as
it hits unstable.
There has been a lot of effort put into making Debian on QNAP work
well (kudos to Martin Michlmayr and Ian Campbell among others) and I
personally think it would be a huge waste to see it gone.
Best regards,
Jan
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