Re: [PATCH] tty/serial: cleanup after ioc*_serial driver removal

[Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2020, Anatoly Pugachev wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 11:16 AM Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Commit 9c860e4cf708 ("tty/serial: remove the ioc3_serial driver") and
> > commit a017ef17cfd8 ("tty/serial: remove the ioc4_serial driver") removed
> > the ioc{3,4}_serial driver, but missed some files.
> >
> > Fortunately, ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl --self-test complains:
> >
> >   warning: no file matches F: drivers/tty/serial/ioc?_serial.c
> >
> > The driver is gone, so remove the other obsolete files and maintainer
> > entry as well.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com>
> > ---
> > Christoph, please ack. Tony, please pick this patch.
> > applies cleanly on 5.6-rc2 and next-20200217
> > only sanity-grep for filenames and make htmldocs, no compile testing
> >
> >  Documentation/ia64/index.rst  |   1 -
> >  Documentation/ia64/serial.rst | 165 ----------------------------------
> >  MAINTAINERS                   |   8 --
> >  include/linux/ioc3.h          |  93 -------------------
> >  4 files changed, 267 deletions(-)
> >  delete mode 100644 Documentation/ia64/serial.rst
> 
> Can you please at leat leave in tree serial.rst since it has generic
> nature and not describing only ioc3_serial driver? Does ioc3_serial
> the only serial driver available under ia64 ? Or can we please not to
> loose some docs? Or do we have a more common serial driver description
> somewhere which has info on ia64 serial driver/ports ?
> 

The description is about situations on very outdated kernel versions, so 
the whole page needs a general update.

I see there is some general troubleshooting hints which might fit into:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/serial-console.html

Feel free to include what you think is worthwhile to keep long-term as a 
patch to Documention/admin-guide/serial-console.rst.

I am happy to support with that, but I am not the serial console expert.

The documentation is not lost, it is just not in the documentation of the 
latest kernel version, when we do not include the driver anymore.
The documentation is still in old versions, which you would need to use 
anyway for that driver support.

I do not know if there are more ia64 serial drivers, but the MAINTAINERS 
entry and commit message suggested there is not another serial driver.

Lukas