Jon Masters wrote:
On Sat, 2011-03-26 at 21:10 +0000, Matthew Wilson wrote:
> 2. Armv7 / VFP / NEON support to squeeze a bit more performance out
> (where appropriate to the h/w).
FWIW, I think (eventually), moving to an ARMv7 base has a lot of
benefit, with not a (lot) of drawback. After all, Fedora ARM is new
enough that there isn't a lot of legacy out there (there will always be
old ARM boards people want to use, certainly), and all of the boards now
being produced are based on Cortex (or similar) designs with v7. There
are one or two notable exceptions, but it's obvious where things are
headed. It's really just a question of /when/ to switch IMHO.
I think you are overestimating the proliveration of ARMv7. There are a
lot of capable ARMv5 devices out there, such as the SheevaPlug/GuruPlug.
Is the plan to offer both v5 and v7 builds (same way as there is an x86
and x86-64 build)? Or v7 only?
> It's probably worth gathering some data on h/w and
experiences as the
> beta progresses. Any objections to my creating a wiki page to track
> and summarise this?
That sounds like a great idea! I'm running Fedora ARM on a bunch of
BeagleBoards, and some PandaBoards at the moment. I have a DreamPlug on
the way, and a SheevaPlug that may get re-used, but hopefully not before
I've convinced myself that ARMv7 is a good base ;)
IMO committing to ARMv7 to the point of exclusion of everything else
would be a bad idea at the moment. The primary motivation for the v7
switch is performance, and there are still a number of ARMv5 and ARMv6
devices out there that are more than adequate on the ARM performance scale.
Gordan