systemd requiring Linux >= 3.7
With our dear universal operating system set to switch over to systemd, I am just wondering if anybody has communicated that this breaks many ARM platforms with "typical" vendors who only care to ship a kernel they once hacked at product launch, and/or the one provided by CPU vendor who barely does much more than fork and abandon stuff on linaro.org.
Okay, Linaro isn't that bad, the expensive ARM chips are better supported than that and the sky isn't really falling. I actually really do like systemd features (though I think complaints about its monolithic approach are valid) and I currently maintain a systemd build of my work for a candidate ARM target which mostly works well.
Except that critical out-of-tree kernel modules written for 3.0 need to be ported to a newer kernel, and undergo expensive re-validation.
Eg. Congatec still actively maintains its fork of Freescale's fork of Linaro kernel 3.0.15: https://git.congatec.com/yocto/meta-fsl-arm-extra
Count how many of gumstix' offerings officially run Linux kernels >= 3.7 (hint: zero) http://www.gumstix.org/access-source-code.html
These vendor's products easily run Debian today but won't boot a Jessie image with systemd.
Not because the CPUs are unable but just the sheer fork-happy, hack&slash insanity of software practice in the embedded space. Has this been communicated to the vote participants?
Or am I completely off-base here? Most of my career has been x86-only until recently.
Cheers
--
Paul Harvey
Sent from my android device.
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