Re: [RFC} arm architecture board/feature deprecation timeline

["Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@arndb.de>]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024, at 21:53, jeremy@jeremypeper.com wrote:
> For the Buffalo devices we still have a lot of folks using Marvell Kirkwood, 
> Orion5x and MV78100 NAS devices. In a world where SATA provides the cheapest $ 
> per TB storage and Gigabit Ethernet is still standard they end up being 
> surprisingly relevant for hobbyists.  
>
> The two pre-DTB device files that we're still using are:
> mach-mv78xx0/buffalo-wxl-setup.c
> mach-orion5x/terastation_pro2-setup.c
>
> If those can stick around for the next LTS kernel that should give me 
> sufficient 
> time to try converting them to DTS like the other Orion5x/Kirkwood 
> devices.

Right, the plan was always to keep them for this year's LTS kernel,
which is almost certainly going to be 6.12. This should be enough
for Debian Trixie.

I expect that the terastation pro2 is going to be fairly easy to
convert to DT as there is already support for similar Orion5x
machines. In this case I would just remove all the Orion5x board
files and you can add a dts file later on. The bit I'm unsure
about here is legacy PCI support. I see that the board file enables
both PCI and PCIe, but I don't know if both are actually used,
or if everything is on PCIe.

I have some old patches for separating orion legacy PCI from
PCIe support, as only the latter has a modern driver (shared
with kirkwood and armadaxp). If you can confirm that the machine
actually uses PCI, I can dig those out from my backups.

The WXL machine is going to be more work since there is currently
no DT support for mv78xx0, but everything except the pin controller
should at least have a driver since this SoC is somewhere between
Kirkwood and Dove. Having a hack for the pin controller similar
to what orion5x has is probably fine, especially if you only
need to support one machine.

Let me know if you need any help during the conversion.

    Arnd