On Sat, 2015-09-12 at 23:26 +0100, Wookey wrote: > +++ Ian Campbell [2015-09-12 15:55 +0100]: > > > The other two subarches in the kernel are orion5x and versatile. I > have > > no personal interest in either. My gut suggests that orion5x (the > > Marvell variant prior to kirkwood) is the one people might more > > plausibly still be interested in, but I don't know that any is > actually > > still using it. > > I think versatile is mostly there because it's the standard QEMU > target. So it's useful if you need armel under qemu-system. Not sure > if this has changed (and I may be confused on this matter).
That sounds likely, yes. I don't know how much need there is for armel under qemu-system these days though. > > How much multithreading is there actually in building packages I > wonder. > > Anything using java failed to build on qemu (no multithreading) so > that may be an area where it happens (if java uses the offending > instructions for its thread support). And for other things I guess > they will build, but any thread-using tests will fail. I was assuming emulation support in the kernel, so I think they should "work" but more slowly. The question is how much more slowly in practice and is it so slow as to be a problem. It may not really matter if e.g. swp emulation is, say, 1,000x slower than running the instruction natively on h/w if only 1 in every 100,000 userspace instructions run on a buildd is a swp instruction. It'll make things slower, for sure, but too slow, I don't know. I think we'll have to wait and see. IMHO there's too many variables to have a sensible guess. Ian.
