[RFC PATCH] arm: drop Execute-In-Place

[Tim Bird]

On 05/05/2011 12:27 PM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 15:12, Tim Bird wrote:
>> On 05/05/2011 12:04 PM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 14:54, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 5 May 2011, Tim Bird wrote:
>>>>> On 05/05/2011 11:32 AM, David Woodhouse wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 2011-05-05 at 11:03 -0700, Tim Bird wrote:
>>>>>>> On 05/05/2011 11:00 AM, Tim Bird wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 05/05/2011 07:52 AM, Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD wrote:
>>>>>>>>> nearly no-one use it, only amop1, pxa and sa1100 implement it
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Sony uses this - a lot.  Principally we're using this on a NEC
>>>>>>>> naviengine part, which is ARM11MPCore based, support for which
>>>>>>>> is (sadly) out of tree.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If you're out of tree, you don't exist.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yeah - I know.  I guess I should tell NEC we'll drop support
>>>>> for their chip and move to another one that supports XIP
>>>>> if they don't get their act together.  If XIP survives...
>>>>
>>>> It is easy enough to keep it alive... as long as someone uses it of
>>>> course.
>>>
>>> i think David's point:
>>> ... someone <in tree> uses it ...
>>
>> I should add that I tried to use XIP on omap (for research purposes),
>> but it was broken and I didn't have time to fix it.  My bad.
>> If anyone is using XIP on in-tree platforms, I'd like to hear
>> about it.
> 
> XIP on Blackfin should work right now, but that doesnt directly apply
> to the patch in question here.  it does however imply that other
> pieces in the stack work (like the MTD/mm layers).
> 
>> As for in-tree-ness - I thought the most recent message was to stay
>> out of tree until the refactoring was over. ;-)
> 
> to be fair, does this have any relevance whatsoever to NEC parts ?
> istm that the hindrance here is NEC doing any actual work for
> mainline.  even if there was no refactoring, i find it hard to believe
> that an NEC port would be posted.  if it were actually something that
> could happen, then they should already be posting patches for *basic*
> review to get the pieces unrelated to the refactoring worked out.
> there's no reason this has to be done serially.

Well, OK.  I just don't want to lob bombs at NEC and then
have some poor soul over there get immediately rebuffed, due to
basic ARM churn.  Maybe not having naviengine support upstream
is my fault, but Sony doesn't make the CPU, so it doesn't seem
like it should be my job to mainline the chip support.  About
the only thing I have at my disposal is pressure not to buy
the chip (but this is harder to exercise than one might think.)
 -- Tim

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Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Workgroup of the Linux Foundation
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment
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