[fedora-arm] Re: State of the mibility SIG, dec 2023

Hi Kevin,

Kevin Fenzi <kevin@scrye.com> writes:

> Greetings.
>
> This will be a bit long, but I hope it will explain the current unfortunate state
> of the mobility sig.
>
> First a bit of history. The mobility sig was originally formed back in 2010.
> The goal then was "… a group of Fedora contributors that are interested in
> Fedora on small devices. Initially aimed at supporting NetBooks, Mobile Internet devices"
> A good deal of progress on small devices like netbooks and tablets was made,
> but then the members of the SIG moved on to other concerns. Then, in 2020 the
> most recent version of the SIG formed. The goal was focused on getting Fedora
> working well on the new pine64 pinephone, and then later when announced the new
> pine64 pinephone pro.
>
> In the last 3 years we have accomplished a lot:
>
> The phosh stack has been packaged up
> We have been producing Fedora Remixes with 3rd party kernels to provide support
> for pinephone and pinephone pro.
> a Phosh spin has been created and officially produced
> There was a effort to get a remix working for the oneplus 6, but
> still requiring a lot of manual tweaking.
>
> Unfortunately, the active members of the sig are not able to move things forward right now.
> The pinephone and pinephone pro are both old devices at this point. They were slow
> when released, and thats not improved. Worse, upstreaming of patches to get either
> of them working with a Fedora/Mainline kernel seems unlikely to us for a lot
> of reasons, including that many of the 3rd party patches aren't in a state that
> upstream would accept and many authors of them have no particular desire to
> upstream them.
>
> The phosh spin is largely not useful in the current situation as the
> Fedora mainline kernel barely boots on the pinephone pro (not at all on the
> pinephone) and has no wireless or display. The image could be of use to
> other aarch64 single board style devices, but since they usually don't have
> displays or modems, the phosh interface isn't of particular insterest.
>
> Until the advent of some performant mobile device to target or more
> contributors who wish to drive things forward, I think we should just
> mark the Mobility sig inactive at this point, including:
>
> Retire the Phosh spin in f40
> Hopefully find new maintainers for the phosh stack if there's folks that want to keep them alive.
> Mark the sig inactive on wiki and matrix.
> respins will move to against a stable fedora release once a week or so, instead of against rawhide and more often.
>
> Hopefully there is someday a brighter day for Fedora mobile devices.
> Folks that want to try and revive the SIG and/or are able to see a good
> path forward are invited to join #mobility:fedoraproject.org.

I'm sorry to hear that you bumped into so many issues with upstreaming
patches and hence have to put the SIG into a dormant state.

Nevertheless, I would like to thank you and all the contributors for
your amazing work and congratulate you for what you accomplished! Let us
hope for better days for a Linux powered cell phone :)


Cheers,

Dan
--
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