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

[Tony Lindgren <tony@atomide.com>]

* Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> [240805 07:58]:
> Thinking about this some more, I wonder if we should just
> change the Kconfig dependencies now (for 6.12, possibly backported)
> and forbid ARM1136r0, i.e. OMAP2 and i.MX31, from being enabled
> in combination with SMP.
> 
> This would immediately prevent the bug you are seeing and
> allow the cleanups we've been wanting to do for a while,
> and it would avoid the larger-scale rework that I had
> planned (moving armv6 into an armv5 kernel).
> 
> The main reason we didn't do this in the past was that it broke
> Tony's workflow of testing omap2plus_defconfig across all
> platforms, but I assume this all changed with the new group
> maintainership anyway.

Yes please go ahead, no objection from me.

Also related, the 2430 support could be dropped as AFAIK there
are no active users for it. It's similar to the 2420 support
that n8x0 use, and only 2420 support should be kept.

> The effect here would be that imx_v6_v7_defconfig would
> only inlucde imx35 but not imx31, and that omap2plus_defconfig
> would turn into effectively omap3plus.

Yes that makes sense for the active devices. Note that
multi_v7_defconfig is too bloated to boot many of these devices..

> I would still tentatively schedule both for removal in early
> 2026, but if we add the !SMP dependency it's not a big deal to
> keep them around after that either. We can make that decision
> next year.

Makes sense and the SMP related change can be done now.

Regards,

Tony