On Sat, 2023-09-09 at 11:13 +0200, Paul Gevers wrote: > Hi Salvatore, > > On 09-09-2023 10:15, Salvatore Bonaccorso wrote: > > but should have been support for armel been > > dropped earlier and should we do it for trixie > > The kernel for armel went over some hardware limits before (I was > affected with my NAS, where I couldn't upgrade the kernel to bullseye as > documented in the release notes [1]). Is the current situation reaching > the limit for all armel devices, or "just" for some and are the others > probably fine for some years to come? The issue exists with many devices supported by the "marvell" flavour. We also have an "rpi" flavour for armel that supports Raspberry Pi models with Arm v6 CPUs, and that doesn't have any size limits that we've needed to worry about yet. > If we're now reaching the final limit and if it was foreseeable that we > would reach that limit, then yes it would have made sense to drop armel > *before* the bookworm release, but alas. If the kernel team can't > support the kernel on armel, than armel shouldn't be a release > architecture for trixie. If it's only some devices, than we "just" need > to communicate that clearly. [...] I would be quite happy to drop the "marvell" flavour for trixie. The size limits are a recurring problem, and the supported SoCs and devices seem to have been out of production for a long time. In contrast, the Raspberry Pi models with v6 CPUs are still in production. (I do have my doubts as to whether it will be possible to continue supporting a useful user-space for armel, but I certainly can't speak authoritatively about that.) Ben. -- Ben Hutchings - Debian developer, member of kernel, installer and LTS teams
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