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Re: Testing versatile kernel on Raspberry Pi?



Hi,

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 05:41:58PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > ARMv5 multiplatform would be nice, but we're constrained by the size of
> > flash partitions on the small machines that are supported so I don't
> > think this would work.
> 
> I had another think about this and compared kirkwood and orion5x.  It
> seems that they are similar enough that we can combine them without
> breaking the size limit (~2 MB compressed), though the result is very
> close.  Combining with versatile is probably not possible.

2MB is... tiny :( I guess it's an arbitrary limit from the
bootloaders? In that case it could be circumvented by chainloading
another bootloader? Probably not worth the trouble (since it's old
HW), though.

> After reducing the number of flavours in this way, we could add a v6
> kernel for armel too, but who would use it?  RPi 1 users expect armhf
> (rebuilt for v6) not armel.

As I wrote, I do not care much for the extra performance win of
armhf (v6) vs armel on the RPi1 (the RPi1s I have lying around
have Debian armel images with kernel from RPi Foundation). In my
environment (often hanging around in a hackspace) the main usecase
of the RPi is attaching hardware, like sensors, to wired network.
This is not really a CPU intensive task.

OTOH I don't know how many people use the RPis that way and since
there is the RPi2 now, I can just use them and get rid of my old
RPi1s.

> > > -armv5     kirkwood + orion5x + versatile
> > > -armv6     bcm2036

^^^ I meant s/bcm2036/bcm2835 here.

> > > 
> > > [0] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1601.2/03005.html
> > 
> > I don't think we're going to add any more hardware support to the armel
> > port at this stage.

I can live with that.

-- Sebastian

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