ia64 platform selection

ia64 platform selection

[Christoph Hellwig]

Hi Tony, hi Fenghua,

I'm currently spending a lot of time untangling the various dma mapping
implementations, and one of the many particularly convoluted
architectures there is ia64 due to the machvec mechanism, which
allows both generic plaform support for all supported platforms as well
as for kernel optimized for specific platforms only.

Do you know if there are any users left running kernel optimized for
a specific platform, or if we can make the generic support the only
available option.

Also I'm curious if we have users of the SKI simulator left - it comes
with various pretty bad device drivers, so removing it would probably
make a few subsystem maintainers happy.

Re: ia64 platform selection

[Luck, Tony]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 06:47:38AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

Hi Christoph,

> Do you know if there are any users left running kernel optimized for
> a specific platform, or if we can make the generic support the only
> available option.

I don't have any of the "specific" platforms that still work. So
although I build test for them, I only boot test a generic kernel.
So they may be broken for all I know.  If it makes your life easier
then by all means delete them.

> Also I'm curious if we have users of the SKI simulator left - it comes
> with various pretty bad device drivers, so removing it would probably
> make a few subsystem maintainers happy.

I ran into someone recently (in the past year) that was still using SKI.
If they make a noise here and want to keep it, then we should probably
do so, otherwise I won't be sad if you send a patch to delete it.

-Tony