[PATCH 15/15] ARM: mark footbridge as deprecated

[Linus Walleij]

On Wed, Dec 4, 2024 at 11:30 AM Arnd Bergmann <arnd at kernel.org> wrote:

> From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de>
>
> Along with RiscPC and SA1100, these are the last remaining Intel StrongARM
> machines. The Corel NetWinder used to be particular popular in the late
> 1990s, but was discontinued during the bankruptcy of rebel.com in 2001.
> The other machine is the DEC (later Intel) EBSA285 evaluation board that
> was made in small numbers in 1997 for software developers.

IIRC David Rusling at DEC was sending this board out to interested
developers.

> The footbridge/netwinder platform was the main target for the first Debian
> 2.0 "Hamm" release on the Arm architecture back in 1998, but was dropped
> in Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" in 2011, which only supported ARMv4T and higher
> with the EABI based ports as ARMv4 hardware had fallen already out of
> use by that time.
>
> Link: http://netwinder.org/
> Cc: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij at linaro.org>
> Cc: Russell King <linux at armlinux.org.uk>
> Cc: Ralph Siemsen <ralph.siemsen at linaro.org>
> Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de>

I am booting it occasionally, last time to test my KCFI patches.
But admittedly that is only to test it for other SA110 users. I remember
that Christoph had problems consolidating the DMA used in this
machine as well so it is standing in the way of useful work.

Apart from Ralph and me I know Marc Z has been known to boot
this machine, so paging him as well.

My machine is using an OABI RedHat MontaVista Hard Hat
derivative but the default userspace doesn't even have a /sys
directory so it's quite dated. I have a minimal homebrew
busybox userspace that I actually use for tests, admittedly
built with an OpenWrt compiler using the --fix-v4bx trick.

So from my point of view this system is on life support:
Acked-by: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij at linaro.org>

Yours,
Linus Walleij