On 2 December 2013 14:04, Robin Humble <rjh+luv@cita.utoronto.ca> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 11:30:46AM +1100, Toby Corkindale wrote:
I really like the little ARM single-board computers. I just wish the distros would manage to sort the hardware support out properly, and then continue to support previous versions for just a bit longer.
does debian on ARM have long term support?
I suspect when the 64bit ARM chips come out then RedHat/CentOS will support them and we'll get long term support. I doubt they will bother until we're out of the 32bit ARM era - 2G of ram for 4 or 8 cores to share (even if they are slow) is very limiting.
IIRC debian has had an aarm64 port since the start of this year.
Ubuntu seems to have gone the other way - chasing the phone and tablet markets (which outside the big two is increasingly cluttered - firefox OS, tizen, jolla/sailfish, aosp respins, 'doze, ubuntu touch, ??), but I guess that doesn't preclude them doing a LTS ARM server spin too.
Ubuntu are doing ARM releases for the server flavour of their distro, and Linaro have been doing releases for a while. I'm unsure where Debian stands. The problem is that in all cases, you tend to need a custom kernel for your board, and the distro makers are only supporting one or two boards. (eg. Ubuntu server is available for three boards, with a fourth in preview status) So all the amateur distros are basically taking those, and injecting a jury-rigged custom kernel into them. This means you do get updates to userland coming through regularly, since you're hooked into an official repository for them -- but not kernels. Chris explained that this is because ARM hardware isn't discoverable. That makes more sense to me now. It's also rather annoying :( The device-tree overlays are a massive PITA for hackers, because the learning curve is steep and the hurdles are high before you can do something simple like switch some GPIO pins, let alone configure more complex things. But it sounds like DTO is going to be good in the long run for making more-supportable hardware. T