Am 16.11.2021 um 21:23 schrieb Stephen John Smoogen
<smooge(a)gmail.com>:
On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 15:10 Peter Boy <pboy(a)uni-bremen.de> wrote:
...
This could (hopefully) solve a number of problems raised by various contributors to the
discussion (and preserve the „trademark").
The main problem is that armv7 is currently built on a set of AARCh64 dual instruction
CPU systems from AMPERE. These boxes can run VM’s of armv7 instructions and allow us to do
builds for Fedora. They are also the way that what few QA tests can be done are done.
These systems are also no longer built, and the newer systems are AARCH64 only.
While it is possible to run ARM via QEMU emulation, this is mainly ‘for demonstration
purposes’ only. The QEMU emulation is about 4 times to 20 times slower than native running
and can lock and crash on non-reproducible faults regularly. Because failed servers cause
ALL koji architectures to fail a build.. it would mean a lot of crashed builds for an
architecture we can’t regularly debug.
Fedora does not do cross compilation so that is not a way out of this either.
These are the major reasons for retiring the armv7 architecture with the hope they are
retired before we end up with no builders in the middle of a release.
Oh, I see, packages and their number are the least of the problems here. Thanks.
Peter