[OpenWrt-Devel] Proposal: Differentiating "skinny" platforms from others... (resending)

[Chuanhong Guo]

Hi!

First of all: Please don't top-post like this on mailing lists :)

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 10:40 AM Philip Prindeville
<philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com> wrote:
>
> I’m not convinced that would be necessary, or that this proposal would create any new circumstances.
>
> An example is that certain architectures are supported by MUSL and others by uClibc, or eglibc, etc.  That in turn means that some functionality is available and others not, because not all packages compile against all architectures and runtimes, etc.
>
> The schism of “fat” vs. “skinny” device in some cases might be an architectural issue, as some processors or SoCs don’t have the physical ability to address more than N megabytes of memory, so they are architecturally constrained.  It’s common for 32-bit processors to have under 4GB of memory and in some cases substantially less than 4GB.
>
> Likewise ARM64 and x86_64 processors can almost guarantee platforms having at least 1GB and usually more.

That will be changed soon.
SoC vendors like Qualcomm and Mediatek are stripping their mobile
SoCs for router solution. Nowadays there are several armv7/armv8
SoCs for routers (e.g. ipq806x ipq40xx mt7622 mt7629). Home
routers don't really need a ton of memory and flash space so router
vendors are likely to keep using limited flash/ram even though SoC
supports more. They typically come with 128M/256M ram and
16M NOR/128M NAND.
An extreme example: TP-Link sells mediatek tp1900ac (a stripped-down
mt7629 armv7 soc with a tp-link badge :P) routers with 4M flash and
32M ram.

This kind of "fat packages" separation has to be a per-target one like
current SMALL_FLASH property, and we either need some clever
package feed setup or more storage space and buildbot demand.

-- 
Regards,
Chuanhong Guo

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