Old platforms: bring out your dead

[Russell King - ARM Linux admin]

On Sat, Jan 09, 2021 at 10:34:57PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 9, 2021 at 6:43 PM Russell King - ARM Linux admin
> <linux at armlinux.org.uk> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 11:55:06PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > * dove -- added in 2009, obsoleted by mach-mvebu in 2015
> >
> > May be obsoleted, but I still use this for my dove cubox with
> > additional patches.
> 
> What is the status of these patches? I also still have a set of patches
> to integrate it with the other ARMv7 machines into multiplatform,
> and a series to change some of the PCI handling in all plat-orion
> platforms, that I was hoping to either upstream or drop once the
> platform itself gets removed.

I really couldn't say - I have over 200 patches in my kernel tree for
the Dove Cubox that give me a fully featured kernel - and I mean
everything, including the vMeta video decoder. I haven't updated the
tree since last Summer, partly because other things have taken
precedence. I couldn't say what the status is right now without
going through an update to 5.10.

However, some bits can't go into mainline - I was totally shafted over
the audio support. There is no way to add flexible support to the
kirkwood audio driver without breaking the DT descriptions for every
board using that - and by flexible, I mean the ability to output DTS
via the SPDIF connector or HDMI on the Dove Cubox. I wasn't listened
to at the time, and it _still_ hurts to this day that there is no way
back from the crippling bad choices that mainline kernel developers
and others made. There was no need for this, other than a desire to
merge something that worked for everyone else but was totally
unsuitable to be able to provide the full features.

> Did you give up on moving the Cubox to DT, or is this something you
> still want to get back?

Yes, because it is the only fully featured platform I have.

-- 
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