From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Arnd Bergmann Subject: Re: [PATCH V6 1/2] of: Add generic device tree DMA helpers Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 11:09:16 +0000 Message-ID: <201209191109.16529.arnd@arndb.de> References: <1347662517-4210-1-git-send-email-jon-hunter@ti.com> <201209172042.11860.arnd@arndb.de> <5058F35A.8040702@firmworks.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from moutng.kundenserver.de ([212.227.126.186]:59689 "EHLO moutng.kundenserver.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752184Ab2ISLJ3 (ORCPT ); Wed, 19 Sep 2012 07:09:29 -0400 In-Reply-To: <5058F35A.8040702@firmworks.com> Sender: linux-omap-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-omap@vger.kernel.org To: Mitch Bradley Cc: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, Stephen Warren , Vinod Koul , device-tree , Rob Herring , Dan Williams , Russell King - ARM Linux , David Brown , linux-omap , Alexander Schulz On Tuesday 18 September 2012, Mitch Bradley wrote: > There is a delicious irony here with respect to Shark. Shark has real > Open Firmware. It's the platform that I used for the first OFW port to > ARM. We (the Shark design team) had a version of NetBSD that would run > on Shark without any native drivers, calling into the Open Firmware > drivers. It was very useful for bringup. Very interesting, thanks for sharing this bit of history. Are you aware of other ARM systems using open firmware that we still support in Linux (besides the XO-1.75)? > Is there ever a point when old architectures leave the Linux tree, or > will people have to see grep hits from them until the end of time? As long as someone is interested in keeping an architecture or driver alive, it stays. If something is causing problems and we have reason to assume it will never be used again with current kernels, we toss them out. Russell has recently removed support for ARMv3 CPUs, but some of the StrongARM targets (especially SA-1100) are still being actively used, so the CPU support is not going away any time soon. If you have a bunch of Shark machines for testing and would like to port it over to device tree passing from its open firmware, you are definitely welcome ;-) Arnd From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arnd@arndb.de (Arnd Bergmann) Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 11:09:16 +0000 Subject: [PATCH V6 1/2] of: Add generic device tree DMA helpers In-Reply-To: <5058F35A.8040702@firmworks.com> References: <1347662517-4210-1-git-send-email-jon-hunter@ti.com> <201209172042.11860.arnd@arndb.de> <5058F35A.8040702@firmworks.com> Message-ID: <201209191109.16529.arnd@arndb.de> To: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org List-Id: linux-arm-kernel.lists.infradead.org On Tuesday 18 September 2012, Mitch Bradley wrote: > There is a delicious irony here with respect to Shark. Shark has real > Open Firmware. It's the platform that I used for the first OFW port to > ARM. We (the Shark design team) had a version of NetBSD that would run > on Shark without any native drivers, calling into the Open Firmware > drivers. It was very useful for bringup. Very interesting, thanks for sharing this bit of history. Are you aware of other ARM systems using open firmware that we still support in Linux (besides the XO-1.75)? > Is there ever a point when old architectures leave the Linux tree, or > will people have to see grep hits from them until the end of time? As long as someone is interested in keeping an architecture or driver alive, it stays. If something is causing problems and we have reason to assume it will never be used again with current kernels, we toss them out. Russell has recently removed support for ARMv3 CPUs, but some of the StrongARM targets (especially SA-1100) are still being actively used, so the CPU support is not going away any time soon. If you have a bunch of Shark machines for testing and would like to port it over to device tree passing from its open firmware, you are definitely welcome ;-) Arnd