Re: possible deprecation and removal of some old QEMU Arm machine types (pxa2xx, omap, sa1110)

[Andreas Kemnade <andreas@kemnade.info>]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2024 23:42:58 +0100
"Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 14, 2024, at 13:26, Dmitry Baryshkov wrote:
> > On Tue, 13 Feb 2024 at 23:22, Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org> wrote:  
> >> On Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 9:12 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:  
> >> > On Tue, Feb 13, 2024, at 16:36, Guenter Roeck wrote:  
> >> > > On Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 03:14:21PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:  
> >>
> >> Andrea Adami and Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov did the work in 2017 to
> >> modernize it a bit, and Russell helped out. I was under the impression
> >> that they only used real hardware though!  
> >
> > I used both Qemu and actual hardware (having collie, poodle, tosa and
> > c860 that was easy).
> >
> > The biggest issue with Zaurus PDAs was that supporting interesting
> > parts of the platform (PCMCIA, companion chips) required almost
> > rebootstrapping of the corresponding drivers.
> > E.g. I had a separate driver for the LoCoMo chip which worked properly
> > with the DT systems.
> > PCMCIA was a huuuge trouble and it didn't play well at all. The driver
> > must be rewritten to use the component framework.  
> 
> If we want to actually go there, I think the best option for PCMCIA
> support is likely to replace the entire "soc_common" pcmcia driver
> with a simple drivers/pata/ storage driver and no support for
> other cards. There was a driver until commit 38943cbd25a2
> ("ata: remove palmld pata driver") that could serve as an
> template.
> 
hmm, main usage for PCMCIA/CF in those devices was often something else,
not storage, at least on the IPAQ h2200. Wondering wether that road is
actually good. When I was mainly using those devices, I was not good in
mainlining things.
I loved that daylight-visible display.

Regards,
Andreas