Dropping the ti-omap4 kernels and related images

Adam Conrad adconrad at ubuntu.com
Mon Sep 23 19:21:40 UTC 2013


This topic has come up several times since we lost upstream support for
the proprietary drivers on the OMAP4 SoC, and after the last time it
did, we (to be precise, Steve Langasek and I) came to the conclusion
that maintaining the Quantal kernel past EOL, a backported X stack, and
a binary driver we can no longer get updates for isn't worth the trade-
off we were hoping to get from it (namely, a platform we could test the
Ubuntu ARM desktop product on).

Ultimately, due to the bits that need backporting to make the OMAP4
images go, we're not actually testing our current desktop ANYWAY, and
it also seems that most of the people using their Pandas for testing
and building are doing so in a headless/server sort of environment and
would be served just as well by our -generic kernel with no 3D support.

We do realize that there are *some* users out there who will be running
Pandas in a desktop setup, but it's just unrealistic for us to support
those forever, given the lack of upstream support for the drivers, so
it's probably in our best interest to tear off that band-aid now, try
to get things as sane as they can be on the -generic kernel, and drop
the desktop images that rely on a sane GPU driver being available.

With that said, unless I hear some very good arguments (backed up with
a solid plan as to how we can make this work without excess maintenance
burden) in the next day or so, I'll be dropping all the desktop omap4
images from the beta, and will be moving the server and d-i images to
using the -generic kernel instead of the -omap4 kernel, so I can drop
the latter from the archive along with the X fork and the pvr-omap4
driver.

... Adam



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