[PATCH RFC 00/20] ARM: oxnas support removal

[Daniel Golle]

On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 03:42:15PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2023, at 10:34, Neil Armstrong wrote:
> > With [1] removing MPCore SMP support, this makes the OX820 barely usable,
> > associated with a clear lack of maintainance, development and migration to
> > dt-schema it's clear that Linux support for OX810 and OX820 should be removed.
> >
> > In addition, the OX810 hasn't been booted for years and isn't even present
> > in an ARM config file.
> >
> > For the OX820, lack of USB and SATA support makes the platform not usable
> > in the current Linux support and relies on off-tree drivers hacked from the
> > vendor (defunct for years) sources.
> >
> > The last users are in the OpenWRT distribution, and today's removal means
> > support will still be in stable 6.1 LTS kernel until end of 2026.
> >
> > If someone wants to take over the development even with lack of SMP, I'll
> > be happy to hand off maintainance.
> >
> > The plan is to apply the first 4 patches first, then the drivers
> > followed by bindings. Finally the MAINTAINANCE entry can be removed.
> >
> > I'm not sure about the process of bindings removal, but perhaps the bindings
> > should be marked as deprecated first then removed later on ?
> >
> > It has been a fun time adding support for this architecture, but it's time
> > to get over!
> >
> > Patch 2 obviously depends on [1].
> >
> > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230327121317.4081816-1-arnd@kernel.org/
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Neil Armstrong <neil.armstrong at linaro.org>
> 
> Thanks a lot for going through this and preparing the patches!
> 
> I've discussed this with Daniel Golle on the OpenWRT channel as well,
> and he indicated that the timing is probably fine here, as there are
> already close to zero downloads for oxnas builds, and the 6.1 kernel
> will only be part of a release in 2024.
> 
> For the dependency on my other patch, I'd suggest you instead
> remove the SMP files here as well, which means we can merge either
> part independently based on just 6.3-rc. I can do that change
> myself by picking up patches 1-4 of your RFC series, or maybe you
> can send resend them after rebase to 6.3-rc1.
> 
> For the driver removals, I think we can merge those at the same
> time as the platform removal since there are no shared header files
> that would cause build time regressions and there are no runtime
> regressions other than breaking the platform itself. Maybe
> just send the driver removal separately to the subsystem
> maintainers with my
> 
> Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de>

Sounds reasonable, so also

Acked-by: Daniel Golle <daniel at makrotopia.org>

(but I am a bit sad about it anyway. without SMP it doesn't make sense
to keep ox820 though)