[RFC 00/10] ARM: Remove support for Exynos5440

[Krzysztof Kozlowski]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 10:50:58PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 10:32 PM, Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk at kernel.org> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> > Overview
> > ========
> > Let's continue the removal of old platforms. We already get rid of Exynos4212.
> > Now it's time for Exynos5440.
> >
> > The Exynos5440 (quad-core A15 with GMAC, PCIe, SATA) was targeting
> > server platforms but it did not make it to the market really.  There are
> > no development boards with it and probably there are no real products
> > neither.  The development for Exynos5440 ended in 2013 and since then
> > the platform is in maintenance mode.
> >
> > The only development happening around it is the PCIe driver for Exynos5433
> > (ARMv8). [1]
> >
> > Removing Exynos5440, makes our life slightly easier:
> > 1. Less maintenance,
> > 2. Smaller code, less quirks,
> > 3. No need to preserve (imaginary) backward-compatibility for Exynos PCIe
> >    driver (so it is easier to add support for Exynos5433).
> >
> >
> > Because of point (3) above - I left the PCIe and PCIe PHY drivers intact.
> >
> >
> > Dependencies
> > ============
> > I think about starting with removal of DTS in some kernel release (patch 1/10).
> > Then all drivers can be removed/updated - subsystem maintainers can pick their
> > patches freely.
> >
> > Finally, after getting rid of all Exynos5440 symbols, the last patch (10/10) will
> > end in arm-soc tree.
> >
> >
> > Any comments?
> 
> I don't see any hard dependency here, if this is all unused, I think we
> can apply both patches 1 and 10 into arm-soc at the same time as merging
> the other patches through the respective subsystem trees.

The only dependency is through Kconfig symbol (SOC_EXYNOS5440).  After
applying 10/10, which removes SOC_EXYNOS5440, some automatic code
testers can complain about non-existing Kconfig option.  That's not big
issue because all this will go away so indeed we could take everything
in one release.


Best regards,
rzysztof