Changes/RetireARMv7

RetireARMv7

Summary

Retire the ARMv7 architecture AKA arm32 or armhfp architecture.

Owner

• Name: Peter Robinson
• Email: <pbrobinson@fedoraproject.org>

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 37
• Last updated: 2021-12-01
• devel list thread
• FESCo issue: #2703
• Tracker bug: #2028172
• Release notes tracker: #776

Detailed Description

The ARMv7 arm architecture was the second variant of the arm architecture that Fedora has supported, the first was ARMv5, the third is aarch64. The proposal is to retire ARMv7 as part of the Fedora 37 release. This will allow ARMv7/armhfp to be supported until the Fedora 36 end of life in around June 2023.

Overall arm32 is generally waning with few new ARMv7 devices added to Fedora in recent releases. To add to that a number of newer Fedora features designed to improve speed and security of the Fedora release are causing issues 32 bit architectures in general primarily due to the process memory limit when linking large applications. The ARMv7/armhfp is the last fully supported 32 bit architecture, we still currently build i686 packages, but it's not shipped as artefacts.

Benefit to Fedora

The primary benefit is to maintainers of the ARM architecture, the various toolchain teams and package maintainers in general.

Scope

• Proposal owners: Work with rel-eng to disable the architecture in koji, remove all the various pungi pieces and clean up any other release detritus.

• Other developers: No action required.

• Release engineering: Releng issue #10387 Disable a bunch of stuff, it's really just one koji admin command and a PR for pungi config changes

• Policies and guidelines: No initial updates to policies and guidelines as ARMv7 won't completely disappear until F-36 EOL.

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Any current users of Fedora on ARMv7 devices won't be able to upgrade to Fedora 37, they will have to stay on Fedora 36 until it's EOL.

How To Test

There's not really anything to test as it's removing the support for an architecture.

User Experience

Any current users of Fedora on ARMv7 devices won't be able to upgrade to Fedora 37, they will have to stay on Fedora 36 until it's EOL.

Dependencies

N/A.

Contingency Plan

Continue on as before with the added advantage of the people that protested the removal of the architecture will be actively contributing to the maintenance of the architecture

• Contingency mechanism: Leave enabled. We basically won't get to this if FESCo doesn't approve the change.
• Contingency deadline: Mass rebuild.
• Blocks release? Yes
• Blocks product? Yes

Documentation

N/A

Release Notes

Fedora Linux 37 with the ARMv7 architecture is retired into the sunset. There will definitely be celebrations, there will likely be some that shed some tears! Overall for the maintainers it will likely be seen as a net win, for the few, generally shrinking, users it's probably a net loss but they can probably just go and buy a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W for US$15. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯