[PATCH 5/6] ARM: dove: Remove watchdog from DT

[Arnaud Patard (Rtp)]

Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de> writes:

Hi,

> On Tuesday 25 September 2012, Andrew Lunn wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 12:14:39PM +0200, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
>> > On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:46:10 +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:
>> > 
>> > > I principle, i agree. However, i'm not too sure about mach-orion5x &
>> > > mach-mv78xx0. orion5x has probably been broken since -rc1 was released
>> > > and nobody noticed. In the same time, we got around 5 people
>> > > independently reporting kirkwood was broken. We have not received any
>> > > new boards for orion5x in the time i've been looking at Orion
>> > > platforms. mv78xx0 only has one board which is not a Marvell reference
>> > > design. So im tempted to not spend any effort moving orion5x or
>> > > mv78xx0 to DT unless these actually hinder the effort of moving the
>> > > others to DT.  What may make sense is to flatten mv78xx0 and orion5x
>> > > into plat-orion and then just watch the bit-rot happen.
>> > 
>> > I'll try to see if I can get people from LaCie to test mach-orion5x as
>> > I have a few contacts there, and I'll contact Marvell to see if they can
>> > still provide Orion-based platforms.
>> 
>> Marvell supplied my one one reference platform. So i can do some
>> testing that the basic infrastructure works.
>> 
>> But the problem with converting to DT is that there is a lot of
>> brainless monkey work needed per supported board, and its very easy to
>> make a typo. So each board converted to DT needs testing. I don't know
>> if we can find testers for all the boards. But should we throw out
>> working boards just because we cannot find somebody to test the DT
>> version?
>
> We can throw them out in a staged process. I think the first step should
> be ensuring that the platform support works on one (or better a few)
> board reliably, and merge support for that into mach-mvebu but leave
> the other ~20 board files in mach-orion5x without spending too much work
> on them. Whether that means pinctrl support for mach-orion5x is a something
> you need to figure out.
>
> The next step would be to label mach-orion5x as deprecated in Kconfig for
> a release and change the help text so it tells people to move to mach-mvebu
> and submit dts files.
>

You seem to imply that every user of mach-orion5x can write a dts
file. Please don't forget that afaik some users are using the kernel
provided by their $distribution, so if it gets broken it may be noticed
months later. Moreover, this kind of user won't notice the Kconfig info
as all they'll get is a binary.

> After that, we can leave mach-orion5x in the kernel for another release but
> completely disable the option to enable it in Kconfig as a last warning.
> This means anyone who is using it will have to move on or talk to us about
> extending the transition period.
>
> Finally, we remove mach-orion5x. Hopefully by that time, everyone who is
> using it will have contributed a dts file for it.
>
>> > Regarding mv78xx0, I agree that I'm not sure what to do. The number of
>> > supported platforms is small. Should we simply mark mv78xx0 deprecated
>> > now, wait a few release cycles to see if anyone shows up, and see what
>> > to do at this point?
>
> We should let Sebastien Requiem comment. He is the only person outside of
> Marvell who has contributed a board file for mv78xx0. If he's interested in
> keeping it alive, he's hopefully also able to find the time to test the
> devicetree version of that platform in mach-mvebu. Similarly, if anyone
> has the MASA reference design, that one could be moved over to mach-mvebu
> first.

There are some mv78xx0 (BP) dev boards used in Debian infrastructure, so
at least, would nice to not break mv78xx0 support.

Arnaud