linux-kernel - Re: [RFC] remove arch/sh?

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Date:   Wed, 26 Jun 2019 20:25:20 +0900
From:   Yoshinori Sato <ysato@...rs.sourceforge.jp>
To:     Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>
Cc:     Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>,
        John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@...sik.fu-berlin.de>,
        Adam Borowski <kilobyte@...band.pl>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Linux-sh list <linux-sh@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-arch <linux-arch@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC] remove arch/sh?

On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 00:48:09 +0900,
Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 4:28 PM Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 02:50:01PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > don't build, or are incomplete and not worked on for a long
> > > time, compared to the bits that are known to work and that someone
> > > is still using or at least playing with.
> > > I guess a lot of the SoCs that have no board support other than
> > > the Hitachi/Renesas reference platform can go away too, as any products
> > > based on those boards have long stopped updating their kernels.
> >
> > My intent here was always, after getting device tree theoretically
> > working for some reasonable subset of socs/boards, drop the rest and
> > add them back as dts files (possibly plus some small drivers) only if
> > there's demand/complaint about regression.
> 
> Do you still think that this is a likely scenario for the future though?
> 
> If nobody's actively working on the DT support for the old chips and
> this is unlikely to change soon, removing the known-broken bits earlier
> should at least make it easier to keep maintaining the working bits
> afterwards.
> 
> FWIW, I went through the SH2, SH2A and SH3 based boards that
> are supported in the kernel and found almost all of them to
> be just reference platforms, with no actual product ever merged.
> IIRC the idea back then was that users would supply their
> own board files as an add-on patch, but I would consider all the
> ones that did to be obsolete now.
> 
> HP Jornada 6xx is the main machine that was once supported, but
> given that according to the defconfig file it only comes with 4MB
> of RAM, it is unlikely to still boot any 5.x kernel, let alone user
> space (wikipedia claims there were models with 16MB of RAM,
> but that is still not a lot these days).
> 
> "Magicpanel" was another product that is supported in theory, but
> the google search showed the 2007 patch for the required
> flash storage driver that was never merged.
> 
> Maybe everything but J2 and SH4(a) can just get retired?
> 
>      Arnd

I also have some boards, so it's possible to rewrite more.
I can not rewrite the target I do not have, so I think that
there is nothing but to retire.

There are too many unique parts of SH and it will be difficult
to maintain in the future.

-- 
Yosinori Sato