Re: [RFC PATCH 0/13] sparc32: sunset sun4m and sun4d

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 7:43 PM Sam Ravnborg <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The sun4m and sun4d based SPARC machines was very popular in the
> 90'ties and was then replaced by the more powerful sparc64
> class of machines.
> Today there is only Gentoo that to my best knowledge supports
> sparc32 and people have moved on to more capable HW.
>
> Cobham Gaisler have variants of the LEON processer that
> runs sparc32 - and they are in production today.
>
> With this patchset I propose to sunset sun4m and sun4d and move
> focus to a more streamlined support for LEON.
>
> One downside is that qemu supports sun4m - and we may loose
> some testing possibilities when sun4m is dropped. qemu supports
> LEON to some degree - I have not yet tried it out.
>
> Andreas from Gaisler have indicated that they may be more active
> upstream on sparc32 - and this will only be easier with a kernel
> where the legacy stuff is dropped.
>
> I decided to divide up the patches to make it possible to review
> the set as some of the patches touches assembler and these parts
> could use some extra eyes if we move forward with this.
>
> For now it builds with the configurations I have tried.

Thank you for doing this, it looks like a very nice cleanup.

> Looking forward for feedback if sunsetting is a good idea or not.

I have no insight on whether there are any users left that would miss
it, but I'm fairly sure that there are lots of people that would rather
see it gone.

> Note: I dunno why git does not see floppy_64.h=>floppy.h as a rename??

It doesn't do that if the old name existed already.

        Arnd