On Tue, Aug 6, 2024, at 13:54, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On Tue, 2024-08-06 at 13:03 +0200, Hector Oron wrote:
>> > It's certainly not easy to determine the actual usage statistics, but as
>> > long as there
>> > is a considerable user base, I think dropping support for hardware because
>> > it's old
>> > doesn't sound right to me.
>>
>> The main reasoning for dropping the port are the problems listed at:
>> - https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html
>
> OK, so the main issue here seems to be the aging hardware of the buildds.
>
>>From what I remember from my discussions with Alex Graf (former colleague
> at SUSE), there are some ARM64 systems which support 32-bit ARM binaries
> without limitations.
>
> Has that changed in the mean time?
I believe the builds are all done on arm64 hardware, and the table
lists the same issue for available hardware on armel, armhf and arm64.
There are a few instructions that armel binaries can use that
are missing on armv8 hardware (cp15 barriers, swp/swpb atomics),
and a few differences in how the kernel treats unaligned memory
access and personality. Emulation for these is a bit tricky to
set up correctly for individual developers, but but the
build servers should generall just work.
Most of issues with armel packages are about libatomic link
time requirements, and about applications that hardcode armv7
or vfp instruction extensions.
Arnd
