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

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2023, at 18:05, Richard Purdie wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-01-05 at 17:50 +0200, Dmitry Baryshkov wrote:
>> чт, 5 янв. 2023 г. в 15:46, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>> > 
>> > From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>
>> > 
>> > The majority of all pxa board files has not been touched in a long time,
>> > and no users have spoken up in favor of keeping them around. This leaves
>> > only support for the platforms that were already converted to DT, as
>> > well as the gumstix and spitz/akita/borzoi machines that work in qemu
>> > and can still be converted to DT later.
>> 
>> Well, tosa also works in qemu.
>> Nevertheless:
>> Acked-by: Dmitry Baryshkov <dmitry.baryshkov@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> I'm kind of sad to see corgi at this point but it isn't really
> surprising. The hardware is old/slow and likely not used by many
> anymore, things have moved on and the systems ended up being heavily
> kernel size footprint limited.
>
> I'd just note that corgi (and shepherd/husky) are strongly related to
> spitz/akita/borzoi, the difference is basically pxa25x vs pxa27x
> processor and pin changes. We chose just to emulate one set in qemu but
> the others would be relatively trivial.
>
> tosa and poodle have much less in common with the other Zaurus devices.
>
> I guess what I'm saying is that if spitz is remaining it might make
> sense to have corgi with it.

Ok, good to know, thanks for the background.

The way we came up with the list of unused boards is to
assume they are all unused unless someone asked for it
to be kept around for this time, for pretty much any reason.
I probably forgot to have you on the Cc list when we discussed
this in the past.

IIRC, nobody specifically asked about keeping either
the corgi or the spitz series, the reason for keeping it
was to have at least one handheld platform with qemu
support remain for testing, but I don't see a reason
for keeping more than one of them.

If you feel like we should keep tosa or corgi and ask
again next year, we could do that, but reworking the series
to keep tosa around would have additional side-effects
on the tmio-mmc driver that can otherwise get cleaned
up quite a bit.

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.

      Arnd