Re: armel after Stretch (was: Summary of the ARM ports BoF at DC16)
On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 06:40:22PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 08:50:40PM +0900, Roger Shimizu wrote:
> [...asking for armel to be retained...]
>
> One way in which the need to keep armel around would be reduced is if we
> could somehow upgrade from armel machines to armhf ones, without
> requiring a reinstall.
>
> After all, armel has been around longer than armhf has, which means that
> there may be some machines out in the wild that were installed (and
> upgraded) when armel existed but armhf did not yet (or at least, was not
> stable yet). Some of those machines might be armv7 machines that would
> be perfectly capable of running the armhf port, except that it wasn't
> around yet when they were first installed, and switching to armhf
> without reinstalling isn't possible.
>
> I once did try to do a similar migration on my Thecus (from arm to
> armel, rather than armel to armhf), but that failed miserably; and since
> I hadn't installed the firmware update to be able to access the console
> so as to figure out what went wrong, that essentially bricked the
> machine.
>
> If there was a supported and tested way to upgrade older armel
> installations on hardware that actually works with armhf, then those
> machines wouldn't need to be able to run armel anymore, and part of this
> problem would go away...
I actually highly doubt there are that many armv7 boxes running armel.
armhf was a nice performance improvement and worth the hassle to reinstall
if you had such a box in the first place. I think most armel systems
are probably armv5, often the marvell chips. Not sure if anyone is
running it on Raspberry pi (Original, not 2 or 3) systems or if those
all run Rasbian armhf instead.
--
Len Sorensen
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