On 12/09/2016 01:53 AM, Ben Hutchings wrote: > On Thu, 2016-12-08 at 23:12 +0100, Christoph Biedl wrote: >> Roger Shimizu wrote... >> >>> I'm ARM porter on armel/marvell (orion5x/kirkwood). >>> Stretch will be frozen and released soon, which makes me bit depressed, >>> because it means armel will be dropped out of unstable/testing as the >>> conclusion of Cape Town BoF. >> >> Same here. My Dockstars (orion5x/kirkwood) still work like a charm and >> it gives a bad feeling having to trash them some day just because >> there's no support any more. >> >> On the other hand, they face another problem I guess is typical for >> that generation, just by the age: Memory. > [...] > > Also, dedicated tiny flash partitions for the kernel and initrd. I > wouldn't be surprised to be find that by the time we want to release > buster we can't build a useful kernel that fits into the 2 MB partition > that most of these devices seem to have.
I'd like to mention my package tiny-initramfs here, which can help keep the size required for the initramfs down quite a bit (without modules it's ~12-14 kiB (!) with gzip on armel, modules increase it by their own size, but nothing else; separate /usr is explicitly supported), and may be useful for at least some of that hardware: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/tiny-initramfs https://github.com/chris-se/tiny-initramfs/ That doesn't help if there's a limit on the kernel image alone and that is exceeded, of course. Regards, Christian
