Oxnas vs Kirkwood

So I'm curious bodhi, with the latest kernel upgrade for Oxnas, it's now very close to Kirkwood. Given the very limited manufacturer support available for Oxnas, what functions / drivers / other low level stuff does it not offer that the Kirkwood kernel offers or is there no difference now?

I have to confess that my Oxnas devices have been a little neglected as I have been devoting most of my hacking time to Kirkwood. Maybe some additional capabilities might reignite my Oxnas crush.

As a side note, the clock is ticking on all these armv5 and armv6 devices that are not 64 bit capable. Noticed a loss of support of many software over the years as the community doesn't have the resources to devote to older architectures. Sad to think about.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/01/2021 12:32PM by LeggoMyEggo.

Leggo,

> So I'm curious bodhi, with the latest kernel
> upgrade for Oxnas, it's now very close to
> Kirkwood. Given the very limited manufacturer
> support available for Oxnas, what functions /
> drivers / other low level stuff does it not offer
> that the Kirkwood kernel offers or is there no
> difference now?

At this point, for OXNAS there is no longer lack of supports like before. Thanks to Neil Armstrong to mainline this SoC, and Daniel Golle (OpenWrt) for a great job modernizing most the drivers. Currently, there are drivers that still in OpenWrt tree and have not been upstreamed. Howver, we don't care much about that. Looks like they are up to the mainstream standards.

OpenWrt is at kernel 5.10.x for the OXNAS now. But for now, I stayed with 5.4.x since it is an LTS kernel and will be maintained until Dec 2025 (longer than 5.10.x, which is Dec 2022)

> I have to confess that my Oxnas devices have been
> a little neglected as I have been devoting most of
> my hacking time to Kirkwood. Maybe some
> additional capabilities might reignite my Oxnas
> crush.
>

What makes this Pogoplug Pro nice is the internal PCIe port! and the great potential for add-on to that port. SATA is a given for all bigger NAS, but the PCIe expansion is so versatile that I think eventually we will get some old gadgets (but new to us) on fire sale somewhere :)

> As a side note, the clock is ticking on all these
> armv5 and armv6 devices that are not 64 bit
> capable. Noticed a loss of support of many
> software over the years as the community doesn't
> have the resources to devote to older
> architectures. Sad to think about.

I think 32-bit kernel will live on a while longer. With the large installation of 32-bit devices in the world, it won't be neglected. Besides, the kernel architecture already have moved on to 64 bit, but the 32-bit backward compatibilty is quite solid (I don't think it will be broken any time soon until 128-bit :). I've looked at some of the code and read some discussions. Great credit to the kernel devs.

-bodhi
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Thanks for your thoughts bodhi.

bodhi Wrote:
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> I think 32-bit kernel will live on a while longer.
>
+1 here.