On 06/20/2011 03:17 PM, Loïc Minier wrote:
Hey thereOn armel, we currently have a versatile flavor of the linux packages and a versatile netboot image of debian-installer. ARM Versatile was added in Debian a long time ago and then in Ubuntu because it could be run within QEMU. Nowadays in oneiric we have a linaro-vexpress kernel flavor and a corresponding d-i netboot image which supports ARM Versatile Express platforms. I'd like to kill the old versatile stuff: - ARM Versatile is an obsolete hardware platform (it got superseded by ARM RealView and then ARM Versatile Express, and even that is getting old) - versatile boards only supports up to ARMv6 CPUs but Ubuntu's userspace is ARMv7+, so we currently carry a patch to user an ARMv7 CPU in our linux versatile build, which is hackish. Vexpress supports SMP with ARMv7 CPUs, but can of course still run a v5 userspace like Debian's. Basically, Vexpress should be technically superior in all respects; notably, it can emulate 1024 MiB of RAM. - this would cut down the build time of "linux" on armel by one flavor out of two; perhaps from 28 hours to 14 hours - however, the kernel tree is slightly different: the linaro-vexpress flavor is based of linux-linaro which includes the Linaro kernel bits while versatile is built of the linux source package, with less patches over mainline Is there any objection to the removal of the versatile bits? NB: I'm seeing two annoying bugs with qemu/vexpress, which I think are present with versatile as well: qemu stalls regularly when accessing the emulated SD (LP #732223) but eventually proceeds; and some network I/O is corrupted or interrupted (LP #799757), but retrying allows to proceed. The latter prevents using things like debootstrap as it can't do any retries. Cheers,
I talked to Oliver Grawert about this. We are quite happy to drop the distro versatile flavour in favor of the Linaro packaged versatile-express kernel.
rtg -- Tim Gardner [email protected] -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
