Moving Octeon ethernet out of staging

[Ladislav Michl <oss-lists@triops.cz>]

Hi there,

Octeon ethernet drivers were once kicked out of staging, just to be
returned back a while after:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200205001116.14096-1-chris.packham@alliedtelesis.co.nz/

All that patchset ends with an optimistic comment:
On Wed, 2020-03-04 Chris Packham wrote:
> I have had a reply from Marvell. They've contracted support for the old
> Cavium Octeon designs out to an external company. I'm not sure that
> means that we'll see some action on these drivers any time soon but at
> least they're doing something.

Now based on Marvell's 277 patches long set against 5.4.30 it seems that
'an external company' is Wipro and 'doing something' is the exact opposite
to 'make driver self-contained' as described in drivers/staging/octeon/TODO

That patchset contains dozen of *Sync-up-SE* patches which basically dumps
mainline changes and replaces platform files with the BSD licensed ones
common for Linux, U-Boot and Cavium tools. Ethernet driver is then synced
to that changes, making it even more dependent on arch/mips/cavium-octeon
code.

To fix staging driver to work with customer's CN7020 based board I'd had to
either go Marvell's direction or use DT for driver configuration, so I
partially did the latter. It is probably broken for anything else than
CN70XX and it breaks the ABI, newer kernel will not work with older
bindings. Is that okay for staging drivers? Does anyone even intend to
use mainline kernel with Octeon SoCs? Of course I'd be happy hearing
something changed at Marvell and they are willing to mainline support
for their MIPS based SoCs ;-)

	ladis