On Thu, Aug 1, 2024, at 07:55, Hector Oron wrote:
> [ {debian-kernel,debian-boot,debian-release}@d.o are in Bcc so they
> can track follow up emails at debian-arm ML if interested. ]
>
> Dear fellow developers,
>
> Debian Installer no longer produces daily builds for this platform:
> - https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armel/
>
> Debian Linux kernel packages are only building support for Raspberry
> Pi Zero, Zero W and 1:
> -
> https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/blob/master/debian/config/armel/defines.toml
> while many other platforms have been dropped.
>
> Upstream projects, ARM companies which I was able to check with, do
> not care that much about maintaining old code for ARMv5t chipsets,
> therefore supporting it is more and more costly resource wise (not
> only in Debian).
>
> Timely to the writing of this email, Arnd Bergmann posted the
> following timeline to deprecate ARM (armel) architecture, you can read
> at:
> -
> https://lwn.net/ml/all/2831c5a6-cfbf-4fe0-b51c-0396e5b0a...@app.fastmail.com/
To clarify the scope of my proposal, as that may be easy to
misunderstand: There is no current plan to drop kernel support
for any of the hundreds of ARMv5 machines that use devicetree,
or remove features that armel depends on.
The only ARMv5/v6 machines that are up for debate at this
point are the Nokia N800/N810 tablet because of its unusual
CPU (ARM1136r0), and a the few PXA2xx and Orion5x machine
that were never converted to DT. If there are actual users,
we'll try to keep them and change them to DT.
The timing I suggested for dropping the non-DT orion5x
machines in 6.13 is intended to still allow the debianonbuffalo
project to support all NAS boxes with a kernel using the
Trixie kernel source package with a custom config. Most
of the ARMv5 machines they support do use DT and will
keep working in future releases.
> Should Debian drop armel from the upcoming Debian release?
This is of course a valid question to ask regardless.
It's clear that armel is used much less than armhf, but
I think it's also still more widely used than any of the
inofficial ports, so the question is when it hits that
threshold of not being worth maintainer time.
Most of the current users are probably fine with armel
being moved from a release architecture to ports, but from
a user perspective I also think it would be nice to do
that after Trixie is out, so that there is at least one
official release with time64 library support.
Arnd
