Re: [PATCH for-9.2 00/53] arm: Drop deprecated boards

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 9 Sept 2024 at 16:02, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Sept 2024 at 15:55, Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net> wrote:
> >
> > On 9/9/24 06:40, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > On 3/9/24 18:06, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > >> This patchset removes the various Arm machines which we deprecated
> > >> for the 9.0 release and are therefore allowed to remove for the 9.2
> > >> release:
> > >>   akita, borzoi, cheetah, connex, mainstone, n800, n810,
> > >>   spitz, terrier, tosa, verdex, z2
> > >
> > >> The series includes removal of some code which while not strictly
> > >> specific to these machines was in practice used only by them:
> > >>   * the OneNAND flash memory device
> > >>   * the PCMCIA subsystem
> > >>   * the MUSB USB2.0 OTG USB controller chip (hcd-musb)
> > >
> > >> thanks
> > >> -- PMM
> > >>
> > >> Peter Maydell (53):
> > >>    hw/input: Drop ADS7846 device
> > >>    hw/adc: Remove MAX111X device
> > >>    hw/gpio: Remove MAX7310 device
> >
> > max7310 is a gpio controller which is at least somewhat compatible
> > to pca953x. It is used on imx6qdl-sabreauto, and also instantiated
> > by Linux with the INT3491 ACPI ID.
> >
> > Is there real pressure to remove support for such devices ?
>
> "git grep" says the only place we use our max7310 device is
> on the "spitz" board. The point of removing all those
> elderly Arm boards is that all this code is ancient and
> unmaintained. If we were using this device on the imx6
> boards I would have kept it, but we aren't. I don't want
> to keep old, unmaintained, untested, dead code in the tree.

I should clarify here that if anybody is actually using
these devices with some other board model today, then
that would be a good reason to keep them. The situations
that I don't think justify retaining them are "in theory
somebody could create this device on the command line
with some other board" and "some future machine or SoC
model that we don't yet have might want this device".

thanks
-- PMM