Re: [PATCH] hw/arm: Deprecate various old Arm machine types

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 8/3/24 18:16, Peter Maydell wrote:
> QEMU includes some models of old Arm machine types which are
> a bit problematic for us because:
>   * they're written in a very old way that uses numerous APIs that we
>     would like to get away from (eg they don't use qdev, they use
>     qemu_system_reset_request(), they use vmstate_register(), etc)
>   * they've been that way for a decade plus and nobody particularly has
>     stepped up to try to modernise the code (beyond some occasional
>     work here and there)
>   * we often don't have test cases for them, which means that if we
>     do try to do the necessary refactoring work on them we have no
>     idea if they even still work at all afterwards
>
> All these machine types are also of hardware that has largely passed
> away into history and where I would not be surprised to find that
> e.g. the Linux kernel support was never tested on real hardware
> any more.

Thanks for writing that down.

> After some consultation with the Linux kernel developers, we
> are going to deprecate:
>
> All PXA2xx machines:
>
> akita                Sharp SL-C1000 (Akita) PDA (PXA270)
> borzoi               Sharp SL-C3100 (Borzoi) PDA (PXA270)
> connex               Gumstix Connex (PXA255)
> mainstone            Mainstone II (PXA27x)
> spitz                Sharp SL-C3000 (Spitz) PDA (PXA270)
> terrier              Sharp SL-C3200 (Terrier) PDA (PXA270)
> tosa                 Sharp SL-6000 (Tosa) PDA (PXA255)
> verdex               Gumstix Verdex Pro XL6P COMs (PXA270)
> z2                   Zipit Z2 (PXA27x)
>
> All OMAP2 machines:
>
> n800                 Nokia N800 tablet aka. RX-34 (OMAP2420)
> n810                 Nokia N810 tablet aka. RX-44 (OMAP2420)
>
> One of the OMAP1 machines:
>
> cheetah              Palm Tungsten|E aka. Cheetah PDA (OMAP310)
>
> Rationale:
>   * for QEMU dropping individual machines is much less beneficial
>     than if we can drop support for an entire SoC
>   * the OMAP2 QEMU code in particular is large, old and unmaintained,
>     and none of the OMAP2 kernel maintainers said they were using
>     QEMU in any of their testing/development
>   * although there is a setup that is booting test kernels on some
>     of the PXA2xx machines, nobody seemed to be using them as part
>     of their active kernel development and my impression from the
>     email thread is that PXA is the closest of all these SoC families
>     to being dropped from the kernel soon
>   * nobody said they were using cheetah, so it's entirely
>     untested and quite probably broken
>   * on the other hand the OMAP1 sx1 model does seem to be being
>     used as part of kernel development, and there was interest
>     in keeping collie around
>
> In particular, the mainstone, tosa and z2 machine types have
> already been dropped from Linux.
>
> Mark all these machine types as depprecated.

Typo "deprecated".

> Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
> ---
>   docs/about/deprecated.rst | 15 +++++++++++++++
>   hw/arm/gumstix.c          |  2 ++
>   hw/arm/mainstone.c        |  1 +
>   hw/arm/nseries.c          |  2 ++
>   hw/arm/palm.c             |  1 +
>   hw/arm/spitz.c            |  1 +
>   hw/arm/tosa.c             |  1 +
>   hw/arm/z2.c               |  1 +
>   8 files changed, 24 insertions(+)

Reviewed-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@linaro.org>