[PATCH 21/21] ARM: Kirkwood: Remove DT support

Arnd Bergmann
2014-02-21T13:07:40Z

On Friday 21 February 2014 01:47:31 Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 16:19 +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Thursday 20 February 2014 14:21:10 Ian Campbell wrote:
>
> > For all I know, the only interesting ixp4xx platforms are the consumer
> > products listed on http://www.nslu2-linux.org/, the other ones you support
> > are development boards that tend to exist only in very small quantities.
> >
> > The main limitation would be the amount of installed RAM, which is
> > either 32MB or 64MB depending on the machine for these. Running a
> > modern Debian with these constraints is probably possible but
> > doesn't sound like fun.
>
> Our most pressing constraint has actually been the size of the kernel
> partition in flash, which is only ~1.4 MB on some of the iop32x and
> ixp4xx machines (and ~1.5 MB on one of the orion5x machines). We've
> modularised as much as possible and turned off some of the features that
> are otherwise standard across all Debian architectures.

Makes sense. I'm impressed you actually manage to get a modern kernel
in 1.5MB and have it boot up a (mostly) full distro. I think we have
in the past dropped a subarchitecture from the kernel when it turned
out its defconfig could no longer fit within the 2MB of flash it
has.

> But I got fed up with trying to make it fit, and no-one else stepped up
> to maintain the reduced configurations, so the last time iop32x went
> over the limit I removed it. As Ian hinted, ixp4xx might follow.

Ok. As I mentioned, I believe OpenWRT is really the playground for
the remaining ixp4xx users that are doing new installs.

Arnd