Bug#933101: buster: baseline for armel raised to ARMv5T

[Andrei POPESCU]

Package: release-notes
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-***@lists.debian.org

Full quote for context.

Hi Dick!

https://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort

It is a wiki page, not the official Debian documentation. Unfortunately, this
page hasn't been updated yet.

Could you please point to where this is documented in order to link to
it from the Release Notes?

On that basis I invested a lot of time getting a kernel ready and scripts and C/C++
development system ready, then I got body slammed after all that time when I learned that
the minimum arm machine required for ARMEL BUSTER is 5T, not 4T. At least this was the
case for busybox-static and also systemd. I could not boot into userspace.

That's unfortunate, indeed.

$ readelf -a busybox | grep Tag_CPU
This shows that this particular binary is not 4T compatible. And I must say, this is a
huge disappointment for me, given the time I have spent on it. Because I am supporting
multiple machines, 5 debian architectures in total, each with rootfs, custom kernels, and
customer C/C++ toolkits, this was all hoping to come together on a common Debian version
named buster.
It seems that the last support of 4T for ARMEL was Stretch. But I cannot dovetail all
these C/C++ toolkits using different versions of the tools. I did this using multi-arch
in a Docker container based on buster for all archs.
If this was an oversight, please consider rebuilding these packages using the corrected
compiler options. Or at least fix the website so somebody else does not lose so much time.

It was not an oversight. The bump happened because various other upstream projects
announced they would raise their minimum baselines to ARMv5T such as OpenJDK.

In either case a policy statement seems to be needed. Was this an oops or was it
deliberate? (Why deliberately make an architecture which is attempting to support old ARM
CPUs NOT support old ARM CPUs?)

The raise to ARMv5T was necessary to keep armel supported. It wouldn't have been
possible to keep the port if had let it at ARMv4T.

Wikipedia only mentions ARMv5TE.

Kind regards,
Andrei

[Andrei POPESCU]

Control: tags patch

Post by Andrei POPESCU

The raise to ARMv5T was necessary to keep armel supported. It wouldn't have been
possible to keep the port if had let it at ARMv4T.

Wikipedia only mentions ARMv5TE.

Below a patch for the Release Notes, loosely inspired from the s390x
entry.

Feedback very much welcome, especially whether this is
an ISA bump (Wikipedia mentions them as "Microarchitectures"[1]).


diff --git a/en/issues.dbk b/en/issues.dbk
index 7b46d168..e11df703 100644
--- a/en/issues.dbk
+++ b/en/issues.dbk
@@ -23,6 +23,20 @@ information mentioned in <xref linkend="morereading"/>.
&oldreleasename; to &releasename;.
</para>

+ <section id="isa-baseline-for-armel" arch="armel">
+ <!-- stretch to buster-->
+ <title>armel ISA raised to ARMv5TE</title>
+ <para>
+ Various upstream projects have raised their baseline ISA to ARMv5TE.
+ As a consequence the baseline for the <literal>armel</literal> port
+ had to be raised as well.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Systems with ARMv4T processors will not work with buster and should not be
+ upgraded.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
<section id="isa-baseline-for-s390x" arch="s390x">
<!-- stretch to buster-->
<title>s390x ISA raised to z196</title>


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microarchitectures


Kind regards,
Andrei

[Paul Gevers]

Hi Andrei,

Post by Andrei POPESCU
Below a patch for the Release Notes, loosely inspired from the s390x
entry.
Feedback very much welcome, especially whether this is
an ISA bump (Wikipedia mentions them as "Microarchitectures"[1]).
diff --git a/en/issues.dbk b/en/issues.dbk
index 7b46d168..e11df703 100644
--- a/en/issues.dbk
+++ b/en/issues.dbk
@@ -23,6 +23,20 @@ information mentioned in <xref linkend="morereading"/>.
&oldreleasename; to &releasename;.
</para>
+ <section id="isa-baseline-for-armel" arch="armel">
+ <!-- stretch to buster-->
+ <title>armel ISA raised to ARMv5TE</title>
+ <para>
+ Various upstream projects have raised their baseline ISA to ARMv5TE.
+ As a consequence the baseline for the <literal>armel</literal> port
+ had to be raised as well.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Systems with ARMv4T processors will not work with buster and should not be
+ upgraded.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
<section id="isa-baseline-for-s390x" arch="s390x">
<!-- stretch to buster-->
<title>s390x ISA raised to z196</title>
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microarchitectures

I would no longer wait if I were you.

Paul

[Andrei POPESCU]

Post by Paul Gevers

Post by Andrei POPESCU
Below a patch for the Release Notes, loosely inspired from the s390x
entry.
Feedback very much welcome, especially whether this is
an ISA bump (Wikipedia mentions them as "Microarchitectures"[1]).

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Post by Paul Gevers
I would no longer wait if I were you.

Still not sure about that part...

Kind regards,
Andrei