Drop versatile support

[Jani Monoses]

The new qemu-linaro package supports OMAP3 so there is no need for Versatile support anymore in the kernel - AFAICT it was there to have some flavour of Ubuntu ARM runnable withing QEMU.

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

Oliver, can we consider dropping versatile. As I understand this we currently would only have these new packages in Natty, would that affect people trying to do testing etc on older platforms, particularly LTS's such as Lucid.

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

Seems that the tools are available for older releases in a PPA at least:

  <janimo> apw, PPA from Linaro https://launchpad.net/~linaro-maintainers/+archive/tools/
  <janimo> apw, so both lucid and maverick are there

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

/me notes we will need to remove the existing binaries from the archive if this goes ahead. Lest they get stuck forever in the release pocket.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

You can go ahead and remove the Versatile support, Qemu from qemu-linaro is emulating both Beagle and Beagle XM quite well, and enough for users trying to emulate an ARM machine with Ubuntu.

Linaro is already using the Omap emulation at their tools, and for the moment even if we still want to emulate Versatile, the kernels are available from previous releases, like Lucid and Maverick.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

After talking with Peter Maydell, it seems that we'll probably need to support vexpress for next cycle (versatile but better), as he's afraid Beagle support will now basically be maintained, but not improved with new features.

So we may end up needing a new "versatile" support for next cycle, even if not needing it for Natty.

[Jani Monoses (jani)]

If beagle will still work for 11.10 it can be the 'versatile' of that cycle, i.e. a valid qemu target to test our images on even if not our most used target. Anyway vexpress is a different flavour so I guess it is an independent issue from dropping the current versatile support.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Jani Monoses <email address hidden> wrote:
> If beagle will still work for 11.10 it can be the 'versatile' of that
> cycle, i.e. a valid qemu target to test our images on even if not our
> most used target.

Yeah, but I believe vexpress would probably be the best one for next
cycle, as it could support more memory and devices.

> Anyway vexpress is a different flavour so I guess it is an independent
> issue from dropping the current versatile support.

Sure, just wanted to point out this as initially the idea to remove
versatile support was more because of the kernel build time, but the
good thing is that for next cycle we'll for sure have a better build
system.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

i dont see a problem in using the linaro kernel though ... no need to re-introduce any versatile flavour in our main kernel just for this

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

I believe we have removed this, and readded it in the generic arm kernels since this was filed.