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Re: ARM Ports BoF: armel in buster



On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 5:22 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> On 08/17/2017 08:49 PM, Philippe Clérié wrote:
>> If none of the curent armel porters want to continue working on armel
>> for buster that is OK, but dropping armel from testing now would result
>> in additional work later for re-adding it.
>
> Roger Shimizu and me are interested in keeping this port as well. That's
> why I am happy to help wherever I can.

Yes, I still have a few armel/marvell devices.
So I want my devices are working towards buster release.

>> With plenty of v6 Raspberry Pi Zero still being sold today there's
>> plenty of new v6 hardware available, and Debian should continue to
>> offer an own root filesystem for such hardware.
>
> Yep. That's my main point as well. Technology has come to a point where
> even rather old hardware is still very useful for small embedded
> applications. The appeal comes mainly from the very low costs as well
> as low power consumption. Also, I would argue that especially in third
> world countries, old ARM hardware is still widely used.
>
>> And for users with v5 hardware there are not many alternatives.
>>
>> This year I have been one of the people who continuously follow
>> FTBFS on the buildds for all release architectures and report bugs.
>> armel is not in a bad shape, basically at the level of armhf.
>
> I agree. With over 12200 binary packages being up-to-date, I don't see
> any particular problems. I recently fixed openjdk-9 on armel and will
> fix anything that people throw at me ;).

I'm also working on kernel related issues on armel.
I just fixed #870185 this week.

On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 7:26 AM, Aaro Koskinen <aaro.koskinen@iki.fi> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 03:04:26PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>> With plenty of v6 Raspberry Pi Zero still being sold today there's
>> plenty of new v6 hardware available, and Debian should continue to
>> offer an own root filesystem for such hardware.
>
> +1
>
>> Regarding the point that v4 is no longer used anywhere else, there are
>> two possibilities for raising the baseline that could be considered for
>> buster:
>>
>> v4 -> v5
>> I am not sure any v4 hardware with a kernel recent enough for buster
>> exists, but the benefits of the baseline increase are also unclear.
>
> There are at least OMAP1 boards that are v4t (ARM925T) and work fine
> with the current mainline kernel.

However, I think armel is time to transit to v5.

Debian ever supported iop32x, ixp4xx, kirkwood, mv78xx0, orion5x, and
versatile as armel flavour. In 2014, support for iop32x, ixp4xx, and mv78xx0
were dropped by Debian kernel, and in 2016, versatile was dropped. [0]
With the merging of orion5x and kirkwood, now Debian supports marvell
as the only one flavour in armel.

[0] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/kernel/linux.git/log/debian/config/armel/defines

So I don't see any reason we should keep armv4t.
Just like "i386" can drop i386/i486/i586 [1], armel can also drop armv4t and
support starting from armv5 smoothly.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2016/05/msg00001.html

Cheers,
-- 
Roger Shimizu, GMT +9 Tokyo
PGP/GPG: 4096R/6C6ACD6417B3ACB1


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