Re: Raising the armel port baseline to armv5te
On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 03:30:22PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> I’m not sure whether there was actually a realistic chance of finding anyone on the mailing lists when you ask such questions.
>
> I would assume that 99% of our users aren’t present on the mailing lists and usually users will only find out that the hardwares requirements were bumped when they are trying to upgrade their machines to the next stable Debian release.
People using such exotic/ancient hardware tend to be non-average users,
since they often have to debug and report issues noone else sees.
And the target audience was big enough that I'd have expected people to
speak up who would have seen ARMv4t-specific bug reports.
A working kernel recent enough for buster on hardware where running
buster makes sense, and with actual users - this might simply no
longer exist.
Even the Neo FreeRunner that was once popular among Debian developers,
and with 128MB RAM one of the better equipped ARMv4t devices, does not
seem to have any kernel available that would be recent enough for stretch.
> I also don’t really see what you’re gaining by upgrading the baseline from ARMv4t to ARMv5. It’s essentially an upgrade from ancient to slightly less ancient. I’m still failing to see any advantage in that.
>...
> So, what are you actually expecting to gain with this bump? You will still be lacking native ARM support for most things.
>...
We would gain confidence that the port works at the baseline.
For all that I know, it is theoretically possible that the stretch gcc
emits ARMv5 code and that thousands of packages in stretch are therefore
broken. Or that some core library uses ARMv5 assembler code.
That's different from code that doesn't run on ARMv5 or uses SSE2 on
i386 where I could immediately give you bug numbers for users reporting
breakages caused by these baseline violations - such baseline violations
do happen, and that's why it is important to have users who report them.
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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