Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] Remove some e300/MPC83xx evaluation platforms

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

On Sat, Feb 25, 2023, at 17:50, Paul Gortmaker wrote:
> [RE: [RFC PATCH 0/4] Remove some e300/MPC83xx evaluation platforms] On 
> 24/02/2023 (Fri 21:16) Leo Li wrote:
>
> Thanks for confirming with your marketing team that they "do not
> recommend any new design with these SoCs" -- it also confirms the
> information I read on the web pages for the platforms.
>
> As those of us immersed in this world all know from the 101 basics of
> Product Life Cycle lessons, it doesn't matter if it is a phone or a
> set-top-box/PVR or whatever else kind of non-PC consumer device --
> kernel uprevs never happen in that product space.
>
> So with the best interests of the mainline kernel in mind, I think we
> are good to proceed with this for summer 2023.  And of course as I've
> said many times before - the kernel is in git, so really you can't
> delete anything anyway - it remains in history forever.

Thanks for working on this, this is a good step towards removing
the known unused code. One aspect I'd add from doing similar cleanups
on arm32 is that I would prioritize removing evaluation platforms
for SoCs that have no other supported boards, and then
garbage-collecting the device drivers that become unused.

I'm not sure where the RDB boards fit in that, in particular if
an unmodified kernel would work on a machine that is derived from
the reference platform, or if it really only works on the machine
itself. On most arm platforms, we moved to having only per-soc
"compatible" strings, but on Freescale ppc32 it appears that
the kernel always matches a board specific string and requires
patches in order to support anything else.

       Arnd