Announcing MinimServer 2 for QNAP

[simoncn]

(27-04-2020 01:13)DavidHB Wrote:  My TS 131 threw up an oddity. The system page of the device clearly states that it has an ARMv7 processor. I wrongly relied on this, and therefore encountered an error when I tried to install the ARMv7 package. Your list (which I should have checked, though this is something QNAP should surely not get wrong) correctly states that the processor is an ARMv5, and that package installed without problems.

Once upon a time there was ARMv5, with no floating point support. The Linux ABI (application binary interface) for ARMv5 is armel, which does not use floating-point registers to pass arguments.

Then along came ARMv7, with floating-point support and a new Linux ABI (application binary interface) for ARMv7 named armhf, which uses floating-point registers to pass arguments and improves runtime efficiency.

To move to the armhf ABI, the operating system had to be rebuilt and applications also had to be rebuilt, as an ARMv5/armel application would not run on an ARMv7/armhf operating system. Most platforms did this because the gain was worth the pain.

Because of the disruption this change causes to existing applications, some platforms (including QNAP on the TS-131) adopted a compromise and moved to ARMv7/armel instead of ARMv7/armhf. An ARMv7/armel platform runs ARMv5/armel applications and ARMv7/armel applications but does not run ARMv7/armhf applications.

MinimServer only comes in ARMv5/armel and ARMv7/armhf versions. There is no ARMv7/armel version. This is why the TS-131 (although it has and ARMv7 processor) requires the ARMv5 version of MinimServer.

It would be possible to build an ARMv7/armel version of MinimServer specially for ths TS-131 and a few other QNAP models that use ARMv7/armel. I doubt that it is worth the complexity and maintenance overhead of doing this as I suspect any performance gains over the existing ARMv5/armel version would be very small, although I cannot verify this because I don't have one of these machines myself.

I plead guilty to oversimplfying this in the instructions for installing MinimServer 2 on QNAP by falsely stating that the 131 has an ARMv5 processor. If you have persevered in reading this far, you will understand why I did this.