Jon,
I see that you have amended the Hardware ARM page to indicate EOL 31 Dec 2021. I recall seeing only x86 32 bit given that EOL, with ARM remaining “watch this space”. Are you able to locate an announcement specfic to ARM 32 bit ?
FWIW, my ARM devices all have Allwinner SoC and all report “not affected” for all spectre-meltdown vulnerabilities.
Hello,
to clear things up: No, armv6l won’t be discontinued by the end of the year, BUT there is probably not much time left for it either.
Some people inside the developer community have pushed for it being discontinued together with i586 and there are a thousands reasons for this.
One of the largest of the very reasons that are for continuing to support it is that there is not enough hardware out there yet, that is suitable for IPFire (as in: has enough interfaces) and supports aarch64.
The decision to discontinue i586 was taken in January 2021, and we could not reach an agreement on what to do with armv6l. We therefore decided to talk about this again in January 2022 and we are hoping that circumstances will have changed so that we can make a decision that will work for everyone.
I personally would absolutely get rid of it. We have too few users on this platform which takes a lot of effort for everyone to keep it work. There won’t be new hardware, so this is basically it. It isn’t a great platform for IPFire and every other architecture has better hardware to offer.
Have a look at the “Architecture” section on here: https://fireinfo.ipfire.org
32 bit ARM is a combined 1.38%.
Yes, I did see that announcement, but for ARM 32-bit it merely discontinues armv5tel, and makes armv6hl the minimum supported architecture. Even relatively old SBC, such as Bananapi (which can be purchased s/hand) use armv7hl architecture.
The most accurate caution re ARM 32 bit might be: “purchase discouraged - will be phased out”