please consider removing netsc520 driver from drivers/mtd/maps/

please consider removing netsc520 driver from drivers/mtd/maps/

[Roland Kletzing]

every now and then i stumble across this "broken" module, and wonder if this 
cannot be removed in 2014. I`m quite sure nobody will be missing that one in 
3.18+ kernels.

it`s still being shipped as a module by popular distros like recent debian or
ubuntu. waste of diskspace and compile time, imho.

there are even chances that these driver being accidentally statically linked
into kernels, e.g. https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/25/666 (cc fenguang wu because 
of this)

also see

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10840
---
This is a driver for an obscure embedded demonstration board. It's also one where
there doesn't seem to be a good way to sanity check before probing. Quite why any
standard PC distro would ship it is beyond me
---

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11226
---
This is a specific driver for an embedded bosrd without autodetect possibilities,
so you shouldn't be loading it on random unrelated hardware.
---

netsc520.c:
 * The NetSc520 is a demonstration board for the Elan Sc520 processor available
 * from AMD.  It has a single back of 16 megs of 32-bit Flash ROM and another
 * 16 megs of SDRAM.

http://sewoon.com/icmaster/Semi/amd/pdf/24323a.pdf
---
NetSC520 Demonstration Board User ’s Manual
Demonstration Board Features
The NetSC520 demonstration board provides the following features. For details see
Board Functional Description
*ElanSC520 microcontroller
*AMD Am79C973 PCnet-FAST III single-chip 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet controller
*16 Mbytes SDRAM
*16 Mbytes XIP Flash memory
---

regards
roland

ps:
not subscribed to this list - hope this list allows for unsubscribed posting 
like lkml

Re: please consider removing netsc520 driver from drivers/mtd/maps/

[Brian Norris]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 04:47:18PM +0100, Roland Kletzing wrote:
> every now and then i stumble across this "broken" module, and wonder if this 
> cannot be removed in 2014. I`m quite sure nobody will be missing that one in 
> 3.18+ kernels.

Probably not.

> it`s still being shipped as a module by popular distros like recent debian or
> ubuntu. waste of diskspace and compile time, imho.

Yep. But that's partly the distro's fault.

> there are even chances that these driver being accidentally statically linked
> into kernels, e.g. https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/25/666 (cc fenguang wu because 
> of this)
> 
> also see
> 
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10840
> ---
> This is a driver for an obscure embedded demonstration board. It's also one where
> there doesn't seem to be a good way to sanity check before probing. Quite why any
> standard PC distro would ship it is beyond me

Yeah, this driver sucks and is probably redundant. It looks like you
could probably just get by with the physmap.c driver instead.

> ps:
> not subscribed to this list - hope this list allows for unsubscribed posting 
> like lkml

...

Does this help you?

  https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=3579ad4113dd6102866abb0ac7b8f329e7d41e4e

  commit 3579ad4113dd6102866abb0ac7b8f329e7d41e4e
  Author: Jean Delvare <jdelvare@suse.de>
  Date:   Fri Mar 14 18:14:20 2014 +0100

      mtd: Fix Elan SC520 dependencies

It means that most distros should not be shipping it any more, since it
depends on CONFIG_MELAN.

I'm also not opposed to dropping the driver entirely.

Perhaps we can mark the Kconfig entry CONFIG_BROKEN (i.e., depends on
BROKEN), and then remove it entirely if no one complains after a while.

I'll take a patch from you that does ths, if you want to write a little
bit of context in a commit message.

Thanks,
Brian