From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Adolf Belka To: development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Re: Time is running out for 32-bit ARM Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2022 14:40:57 +0200 Message-ID: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============7322001704909398041==" List-Id: --===============7322001704909398041== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hi All, Michael's suggested approach sounds fine to me. However, like Peter, I=20 don't use any arm machines for IPFire so I don't have any impact personally. Hopefully there will be some arm users that are on the dev mailing list=20 that will also provide input. Regards, Adolf. On 06/08/2022 14:24, Michael Tremer wrote: > Hello all, > > Thank you for picking this up on the list. > > I would like to make the following proposal: > > * We discontinue building for armv6l on May 31st 2023 - in a little less= than a year > * We keep hosting the packages for another three months and will remove = them from the servers after that > > This is based on the following: > > * As of today, have 0.98% of our user base on armv6l > * This used to be 1.69% on Jan 1st, 2021 and 1.67% on Jan 1st, 2022. > > There is definitely a decline in the usage of that architecture and it is o= f course incredibly small anyways. With all the extra work and workarounds th= at we have in the code base here, the days and weeks that is going into it, t= his has surpassed the threshold where there is no growing or steady user base= any more. > > Having said that, aarch64 (as of today) only has 1.29% of our users. Not pa= rticularly a lot, but it has been steadily growing. Fingers crossed that it w= ill gain more momentum in the future. > > Why would we not discontinue this now? I personally feel that I would like = to give people decent time to migrate away from this. Right now, we have lots= of supply issues, it is already mid-August, which would result in about thre= e months until EOL. Not that this would offend a large number of users, but I= don=E2=80=99t think that we should make life too much more complicated for a= nyone than it has to be. > > We still have a running distribution that does not have any significant pro= blems on armv6l compared to the other architectures. It costs us build times = - yes. It might cost us some extra development time - yes. But this is what w= e have signed up for when we adopted this architecture. So we have to bear so= me responsibility. > > -Michael > >> On 2 Aug 2022, at 11:08, Peter M=C3=BCller wr= ote: >> >> Hello *, >> >> in January [1], we already discussed the situation of 32-bit ARM, and sett= led on >> demoting this architecture as "legacy" on [2], and advising people from bu= ying new >> 32-bit ARM hardware in the wiki. >> >> To some extends, this architecture shares a similar fate than 32-bit Intel= did: >> Security features are not backported to it, maintenance requires a lot of = effort >> due to missing upstream support, hardware base is diminishing, and its IPF= ire >> userbase does not justify the resources required for keeping the distribut= ion >> reasonably maintained on this architecture. >> >> The other night, we have therefore agreed on putting an end to IPFire supp= ort for >> 32-bit ARM, and take the question of the anticipated timeframe to this mai= ling list. >> [3] >> >> At the time of writing, Fireinfo reports 0.94% of all IPFire installations= to run >> on supported 32-bit ARM devices, to give you a figure. [4] >> >> Personally, since these devices are unlikely to run in enterprises or othe= r critical >> environments, I would be fine with announcing EOL for 32-bit ARM at the en= d of >> this year. However, as I am not running any affected IPFire installations,= my >> opinion is biased - let's hear yours. :-) >> >> Thanks in advance for your reply, and best regards, >> Peter M=C3=BCller >> >> [1] https://wiki.ipfire.org/devel/telco/2022-01-03 >> [2] https://www.ipfire.org/download >> [3] https://wiki.ipfire.org/devel/telco/2022-08-01 >> [4] https://fireinfo.ipfire.org/ --=20 Sent from my laptop --===============7322001704909398041==--