Re: possible deprecation and removal of some old QEMU Arm machine types (pxa2xx, omap, sa1110)

[Linus Walleij]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 9:12 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 13, 2024, at 16:36, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 03:14:21PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >> On Mon, 12 Feb 2024 at 14:36, Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net> wrote:
> >> > On 2/12/24 04:32, Peter Maydell wrote:

> >> > > The one SA1110 machine:
> >> > >
> >> > > collie               Sharp SL-5500 (Collie) PDA (SA-1110)
> >> > >
> >> > I do test collie.
>
> Adding Linus Walleij and Stefan Lehner to Cc, as they were
> interested in modernizing sa1100 back in 2022. If they
> are still interested in that, they might want to keep collie
> support.

I'm not personally interested in the Collie, I have a SA1100 hardware
but not that one.

> Surprisingly, at the time I removed unused old board files,
> there was a lot more interest in sa1100 than in the newer
> pxa platform, which I guess wasn't as appealing for
> retrocomputing yet.

Andrea Adami and Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov did the work in 2017 to
modernize it a bit, and Russell helped out. I was under the impression
that they only used real hardware though!

The Collie is popular because it is/was easy to get hold of and
easy to hack. PXA was in candybar phones (right?) which
are just veritable fortresses and really hard to hack so that is why
there is no interest (except for the occasional hyperfocused Harald
Welte), so those are a bit like the iPhones: you *can* boot something
custom on them, but it won't be easy or quick, and not as fun and
rewarding.

The thriving world of PostmarketOS only exist because Google was
clever to realize devices should have a developer mode.

Yours,
Linus Walleij