Linux Looking To Sunset The Calxeda ARM Server Support

It's already been six years since the collapse of Calxeda as the first promising ARM server company. With that, the Linux kernel upstream developers are looking at dropping the Calxeda platform support.

Calxeda ARM servers never reached widespread deployment for these 32-bit ARM servers but mostly were used by various Linux distributions for building ARMv7 packages at the time and other software companies. Seeing any Calxeda server still in production in 2020 is quite rare and if so is probably running an older software stack, so kernel developers are looking at dropping this support to avoid the maintenance burden moving forward.

Additionally, Linux developers are preparing to drop support for KVM virtualization on 32-bit ARM hosts, further reducing the likelihood of anyone still using Calxeda servers in production and riding the latest version of the Linux kernel.

Calxeda servers were comprised of clusters of quad-core Cortex-A9 processors that operated up to 1.4GHz at 5 Watts per node with 4GB of DDR3 memory. They were fun to benchmark back in the day but their price, performance, and power efficiency never really lived up to expectations.

Now in 2020 the Calxeda platform support is likely to be removed with the proposed patches and that would free up just under five thousand lines of kernel code from various Calxeda drivers and DeviceTree files.