1 |
On 07/08/2014 21:48, Matthew Thode wrote: |
2 |
> arm has a historical problem with stabilization, while keywording |
3 |
> doesn't require access to all arm sub-arches the problem with the |
4 |
> stabilization slowness causes running a full ~arm to become hard. By |
5 |
> that I mean that if someone keywords something for arm because it works |
6 |
> on armv7 and I run ~arm because stabilization takes forever then my |
7 |
> system may break because of both non-stabilized packages and because I |
8 |
> could be running armv6. |
9 |
> |
10 |
> In any case I propose splitting out arm into armv4, armv5, armv6 and |
11 |
> armv7. armv8 seems to be here already as arm64. |
12 |
|
13 |
Couldn't this be better handled with some profile work? These sound like |
14 |
versions of Instruction Set Architectures. In the MIPS world, you have your |
15 |
original ISAs, mips1 through mips4, then you have the newer variants of |
16 |
mips32r* (branches from mips2) and mips64r* (branches from mips4). Anything |
17 |
supporting mips4 could also support earlier ISAs. Throw in our three |
18 |
supported ABIs (o32, n32, n64), and machine-specific curiosities (SGI, |
19 |
Cobalt, Yeelong/Loongson, etc), and life can be quite fun. But we can cover |
20 |
all of this with just a single 'mips' keyword in the tree. |
21 |
|
22 |
Is that similar to how these ARM variants work? Can an armv7 run code for |
23 |
armv6 and earlier? |
24 |
|
25 |
Splitting 'arm' into four new keywords, on top of 'arm64' is just going to |
26 |
give you guys major headaches later. You might even consider dedicated USE |
27 |
flags for the arm subvariants and use those to control things in an ebuild |
28 |
where applicable. |
29 |
|
30 |
|
31 |
> I think this would be beneficial because of not all developers that want |
32 |
> to help with arm have or what all the sub-arches necessary. It also |
33 |
> allows us to move faster on stabilization because most of us have access |
34 |
> to armv7 a bit easier. This would take some pressure off of the people |
35 |
> doing stabilization for older sub-arches, but not much. |
36 |
|
37 |
What's the support status of Gentoo on the older variants, such as armv4 and |
38 |
armv5 stuff? How fast is the CPU clock on those? Do they include L2/L3 |
39 |
cache? Lots of memory? Generally, anything that could be a bottleneck or |
40 |
severely increase the build time should be weighed against the potential |
41 |
number of users and possibly support dropped if there aren't enough |
42 |
developers or contributing users to maintain it. |
43 |
|
44 |
I.e., w/ MIPS, we don't support anything under the mips3 ISA, which includes |
45 |
DECStations (Debian does support those). Build times would just be |
46 |
tremendously slow and I haven't seen a lot of desire to support those. |
47 |
|
48 |
-- |
49 |
Joshua Kinard |
50 |
Gentoo/MIPS |
51 |
kumba@g.o |
52 |
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28 |
53 |
|
54 |
"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And |
55 |
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between." |
56 |
|
57 |
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic |