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Date:      Wed, 10 Apr 2019 09:12:09 -0600
From:      Ian Lepore <ian@freebsd.org>
To:        Balanga Bar <balanga.bar@gmail.com>, freebsd-arm@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Marvell Kirkwood - anyone?
Message-ID:  <693425711bdc5e7fbff22bb4056c33326fca8c4d.camel@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <CADocevBefY03R2QMKfnsuSp=XM4WBGC3yQFLzQ=1zuD7GGk5qQ@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CADocevBefY03R2QMKfnsuSp=XM4WBGC3yQFLzQ=1zuD7GGk5qQ@mail.gmail.com>

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On Wed, 2019-04-10 at 06:23 +0000, Balanga Bar wrote:
> Is anyone using any Marvell Kirkwood devices?
> 
> I'm trying to build a reliable system, but am struggling to make it
> work.
> Could do with some help on the correct way of building it.
> _______________________________________________
> 

To be honest, the Kirkwood stuff is all but completely unsupported at
this point.  A few people over the past few years have reported some
success with it.  My own experience is that no armv4 or v5 platforms
have really worked reliably for many years.  When it does work for
people, they're just lucky that they're not running into any of the
bugs that are known to exist in the old arm support.

Basically the problem is resources: there is nobody both willing and
able to support the old armv5 stuff anymore.  The company I work for
used to put their resources into supporting old arm chips, but we've
moved on to armv7 stuff for the current products, so I don't get to
spend $work hours on armv5 support anymore.

So all in all, you're really better off with some newer armv7 or v8
(64-bit) hardware.  It's cheaper and more powerful, but you do miss out
on one thing that Kirkwood supported: dual GigE ports, which just don't
seem to exist in the modern arm world.

-- Ian




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