Hello everyone,
So since we had a good week of silence on this, I think it is time to come to a decision.
I had a conversation with Arne today to check on the last few things I needed to know and together (and based on opinions voiced by others and the facts) we have made the decision to retire support for armv6l by Feb 28 2023.
That date has been chosen as a compromise between shutting it down sooner rather than later, and giving people enough time to migrate away. It is a little bit over 6 months which should be enough time to find some new hardware for the people affected.
There is now officially nobody in the group of developers who wants to keep this architecture alive, and I think it is the best way to give it another six months.
I will submit a patch to show a warning and in early February will submit a patch that removes any extra code or quirks that we have implemented for this architecture.
Best, -Michael
On 6 Aug 2022, at 16:31, Michael Tremer michael.tremer@ipfire.org wrote:
Hello,
On 6 Aug 2022, at 13:40, Adolf Belka adolf.belka@ipfire.org wrote:
Hi All,
Michael's suggested approach sounds fine to me. However, like Peter, I 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 that will also provide input.
That would be great indeed. If not, I will also take that as answer.
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 of course incredibly small anyways. With all the extra work and workarounds that we have in the code base here, the days and weeks that is going into it, this 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 particularly a lot, but it has been steadily growing. Fingers crossed that it will 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 three months until EOL. Not that this would offend a large number of users, but I don’t think that we should make life too much more complicated for anyone than it has to be.
We still have a running distribution that does not have any significant problems 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 we have signed up for when we adopted this architecture. So we have to bear some responsibility.
-Michael
On 2 Aug 2022, at 11:08, Peter Müller peter.mueller@ipfire.org wrote:
Hello *,
in January [1], we already discussed the situation of 32-bit ARM, and settled on demoting this architecture as "legacy" on [2], and advising people from buying 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 IPFire userbase does not justify the resources required for keeping the distribution reasonably maintained on this architecture.
The other night, we have therefore agreed on putting an end to IPFire support for 32-bit ARM, and take the question of the anticipated timeframe to this mailing 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 other critical environments, I would be fine with announcing EOL for 32-bit ARM at the end 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 Müller
[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/
-- Sent from my laptop