Re: Architecture baseline for Forky
On Mon, Oct 27, 2025 at 10:22:35PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 27, 2025, at 12:31, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>...
> >> There could be one change done to armhf: enabling NEON by default as Tegra2
> >> is long time gone.
> >
> > Atmel SAMA5D3 is still in production, and popular for low-end embedded devices.
>
> SAMA5D3 is an interesting corner case, possibly the only ARMv7+VFPv3d16
> chip you can still buy after the end of Tegra2 and ArmadaXP (which still
> have users).
SAMA5D3 is ARMv7+VFPv4d16.
While the FPU itself is optional, when it is present it's v4 since A5 is
a relatively recent (compared to A8/A9) design.
> I would still agree with Marcin here: SAMA5D3 was Atmel's first attempt
> at an ARMv7 chip back in 2013, and everything after it had NEON including
> the 2014 SAMA4D4 and of course all the SAMA7. It only has DDR2/LPDDR2
> support, which means it's no longer cost-effective compared to newer
> chips with DDR3. I would expect even SAM9X7 to be much more popular
> than SAM5A3 in ongoing production: SAM9X7 is only an ARM926 and won't
> run anything newer than Trixie/Armel, but it does have modern I/O
> and DDR3 memory. If dropping SAM9x7 (along with all other v5/v6)
> support made sense for sid, then so should dropping support for the
> SAMA5D3/vfpv3d16.
You are misunderstanding what the problems with armel are.
On the technical side the problem with armel is that the ecosystem is
crumbling away. Not necessarily at the toolchain side, but e.g. Firefox
is no longer supporting armel and GNOME uses a copy of Firefox as
Javascript library and this has several transitive reverse dependencies.
But even more important is the human side.
I suspect the root problem is that while many people who went to
university in the 90s and 00s picked porting to exotic platforms
as a hobby, students today pick other hobbies.
This was the porter situation for jessie just 10 years ago[1]:
https://release.debian.org/jessie/arch_qualify.html
For the 3 arm architecture I am counting 13 distinct people who
volunteered as porters.
And 8 porters for Hurd/i386.
There was no porter rollcall for trixie, the situation for bookworm
3 years ago was:
https://release.debian.org/bookworm/arch_qualify.html
3 distinct people who were porters for the 3 arm architectures.
By now the number of people who still have the interest and time to
commit to constantly do non-trivial porting work for arm on Debian
has gotten even closer to 0.
armel might be salvageable if suddenly a couple of DDs would declare
their desire to keep it alive and start working on it, but that won't
happen.
> Arnd
cu
Adrian
[1] mouseover shows the porter names
Reply to: