[RFC} arm architecture board/feature deprecation timeline

[Aaro Koskinen]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 07:29:29PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> === early ARMv6 ===
> 
> This is the ARM1136r0p in NXP i.MX31 and OMAP24xx, which in
> practice means just the Nokia N8xx tablet.
> It causes a lot of pain to support in the kernel since it
> requires special hacks to support in SMP-enabled kernels.

FWIW, I have been never able to boot N8x0 unless CONFIG_SMP was disabled
(but haven't tested recently if the situation has changed). And probably
nobody else is anymore even booting these with modern kernels. Common
distro kernel support for N8x0 would be unlikely anyway due to bootloader
and memory limitations.

These tablets are not very attractive for hobbyists anymore as the display
support got broken and eventually deleted due to bitrot. There has been
some out-of-tree patches/interest to regain display and other features,
but no major progress really in 10 years or so. The last major mainline
feature was adding Retu watchdog support that allowed the device to stay
on longer than 30 seconds after the boot (the hardware watchdog cannot
be disabled).

I guess in OMAP-land N8x0 is one of the least used/active boards, so if
it causes "a lot of pain" then maybe could be a candidate for deprecation.
But with custom kernel config, the board has been pretty stable overall
between the releases for limited use cases.

> === OMAP1 ===
> 
> This is now the only ARMv4T/ARMv5 platform with no
> DT support, making it a target for removal at some
> point. Unlike PXA, there are still users, but it seems
> there are no current plans for a DT conversion.
> 
> I would suggest going through the five boards
> individually to see which ones we can remove in 2025
> and keep the remaining ones for the moment.

Here situation hasn't changed - all of the boards are equally
important/useful, at least from a maintainer point of view. The routine
I use to test/debug kernel releases relies on all of them.

A.