Re: [PATCH 01/27] ARM: pxa: remove unused board files

From: "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de>
To: "Richard Purdie" <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>,
	"Dmitry Baryshkov" <dbaryshkov@gmail.com>,
	"Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@kernel.org>
Cc: "Robert Jarzmik" <robert.jarzmik@free.fr>,
	"Daniel Mack" <daniel@zonque.org>,
	"Haojian Zhuang" <haojian.zhuang@gmail.com>,
	linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, "Ales Bardorfer" <ales@i-tech.si>,
	"Ales Snuparek" <snuparek@atlas.cz>,
	"Alex Osborne" <ato@meshy.org>,
	"Alex Osborne" <bobofdoom@gmail.com>,
	"Dirk Opfer" <dirk@opfer-online.de>, "Ian Molton" <spyro@f2s.com>,
	"Lennert Buytenhek" <kernel@wantstofly.org>,
	"Marek Vasut" <marek.vasut@gmail.com>,
	"Michael Petchkovsky" <mkpetch@internode.on.net>,
	"Nick Bane" <nick@cecomputing.co.uk>,
	"Paul Parsons" <lost.distance@yahoo.com>,
	"Philipp Zabel" <philipp.zabel@gmail.com>,
	"Sergey Lapin" <slapin@ossfans.org>,
	"Tomas Cech" <sleep_walker@suse.cz>,
	"Linus Walleij" <linusw@kernel.org>,
	"Marc Zyngier" <maz@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 01/27] ARM: pxa: remove unused board files
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2023 10:47:09 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <0690759c-8e74-429e-a3f9-c20aaac9c92f@app.fastmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <8bec242f6f69c87f99309ed5c20e2f0be2b533c7.camel@linuxfoundation.org>

On Thu, Jan 5, 2023, at 23:45, Richard Purdie wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-01-05 at 23:16 +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 5, 2023, at 18:05, Richard Purdie wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2023-01-05 at 17:50 +0200, Dmitry Baryshkov wrote:
>> 
>> In the long run, I expect we will remove all the remaining
>> legacy boardfiles and only keep the DT support. Ideally
>> if someone is motivated to convert spitz to DT, supporting
>> corgi the same way is also easy.
>
> Personally, I'm not that interested in tosa (or poodle/collie).
>
> The other zaurus devices are interesting for me as I know the platform,
> they have qemu emulation, there are set of devices which are similar
> but also have differences and there were one of the original targets
> for OpenEmbedded and Yocto Project. I did quite a bit of work to get
> one kernel which could run on multiple devices, as best you could at
> the time! I'd actually forgotten about the qemu emulation.
>
> There is a need for better automated testing around DT in OE/YP and
> this is making me wonder about a few potential ideas.

Ok

> Is there any conversion to DT you can easily point at as an example of
> the kinds of changes needed?

Robert Jarzmik and Daniel Mack worked on the conversion of the
PXA platform to DT. Daniel contributed the port for Raumfeld,
which should be complete, while Robert worked on more driver
conversions and mentioned[1] that he had converted additional
boards in the past but did not merge it upstream. They
can probably point you to whatever is missing. I would expect
the generic PXA drivers (spi, mmc, nand, i2c, audio, fb, gpio,
keypad) to  basically work work a correct DT description,
while the machine specific drivers (scoop and pcmcia mainly)
will need DT support in the driver.

In addition, Linus Walleij and Marc Zyngier have both expressed
interest in keeping sa1100 (h3600, collie, assabet, jornada720)
alive, but those don't have any DT support yet and require
much more work. Also note that while you can now build a kernel
that includes support for all little-endian ARMv4T and ARMv5
machines, StrongARM machine still require a separate kernel
build.

     Arnd

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/803778517.2279639.1667493436959.JavaMail.open-xchange@opme11oxm02aub.pom.fr.intraorange/