Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] vlynq: remove bus support

Florian Fainelli
2023-09-16T16:43:50Z

On 9/16/2023 4:11 AM, Jonas Gorski wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Sept 2023 at 11:18, Wolfram Sang <wsa@kernel.org> wrote:
>>
>> From: Wolfram Sang <wsa+renesas@sang-engineering.com>
>>
>> I'd like to clean up the 'drivers' directory and Kconfig menu, at least
>> a little. One major thing I noticed is that VLYNQ can actually be
>> removed. From patch 2:
>>
>> ---
>> There are no users with a vlynq_driver in the Kernel tree. So, remove
>> the bus driver which hardly has seen any activity since 2009. It was
>> even marked EXPERIMENTAL as long as that symbol existed. OpenWRT had
>> some out-of-tree drivers which they probably intended to upport, but AR7
>> devices are not supported anymore because they are "stuck with Kernel
>> 3.18" [1]. So, this code can go nowadays.
>>
>> [1] https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/targets/ar7
>> ---
>>
>> Patch 1 removes MIPS specific bus initialization code which is the only
>> user of the VLYNQ bus currently.
>>
>> Sending out as RFC to gather comments. Patches are based on 6.6-rc1 and
>> created with "--irreversible-delete" to save some space. They are
>> compile tested only, buildbots were happy.
>>
>> I think this mainly goes to Florian Fainelli. Florian, what do you
>> think?
>
> I'm not Florian, but I worked a bit with AR7 as well, and going
> through the (previously) supported/known devices they topped out at 8
> MiB Flash and 32 MiB RAM, which isn't enough to run any reasonably
> modern OpenWrt even if one would be willing to re-add support for it.
>
> So from my perspective I suggest even dropping the AR7 code entirely.
> I seriously doubt anyone is running a modern kernel on that.

Agreed, TI AR7 is nearly 25 years old now, we should be able to remove
that. Wolfram, do you feel like doing that or would you rather have me
do it, say next week?
--
Florian