Re: Qnap TS-219P+ Kernel 5.9.0-1-marvell
On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 9:29 AM Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ti 3. marrask. 2020 klo 22.44 Uwe Kleine-König (uwe@kleine-koenig.org)
> kirjoitti:
> > For now it is not even certain that bullseye will include support for
> > armhf at all. See
>
> Just noting that I love how many times these discussions occur along
> the lines of "armhf starts to be quite old and with problems, not sure
> how long it is going to be supported" and then the opportunity to
> delightfully answer "well... it's armel" :)
>
> Some bits of history, these QNAP devices are not ancient as such, they
> were announced in 2013. But they happened to use a Marvell Kirkwood
> chipset which is only ARMv5, using an ARM core that was announced in
> 2001 (with some Wikipedia checking). ARMv7 ie armhf cores would have
> been available since 2007.
The core itself is not that old either: the dual-issue ARMv5 cores from
Marvell in the Kirkwood SoC only arrived on the market around 2009
and were competitive with Cortex-A8 on integer workloads but
they lacked the ARMv7 and VFP/NEON instructions.
Marvell added support for that two years later in the PJ4 core that
evolved from this pipeline design.
Later ARMv5 processors were indeed based on the old ARM926 core
from 2001, and these are still getting put into new SoCs and SiPs such
as Microchip SAM9x60 or Allwinner F1C200s. These are not going away
any time soon, but they are at the absolute bottom price for Linux
systems.
I was hoping to see two more Debian armel releases to run on that
class of ARM926 hardware, but something has to be done about the
build infrastructure as the Marvell based machines are at the end of
their useful life and the newer low-end machines cannot replace them
either.
> A bit similarly my Openmoko GTA02 in 2008 had ARMv4 (the Debian armel
> baseline) compatible CPU, which had an ARM core announced in 1998.
> Sometimes new things are a bit slow to trickle.
I would compare it more to Cortex-A17 based chips that came out in 2014,
two years after ARMv8 was introduced. This was the peak for ARMv7
and any later designs were either 64-bit or based on the low-end Cortex-A5
and Cortex-A7 cores.
Arnd
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