linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] vlynq: remove bus support

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Date:   Sat, 16 Sep 2023 13:11:41 +0200
From:   Jonas Gorski <jonas.gorski@...il.com>
To:     Wolfram Sang <wsa@...nel.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@...il.com>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Wolfram Sang <wsa+renesas@...g-engineering.com>,
        linux-mips@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] vlynq: remove bus support

On Sat, 16 Sept 2023 at 11:18, Wolfram Sang <wsa@...nel.org> wrote:
>
> From: Wolfram Sang <wsa+renesas@...g-engineering.com>
>
> I'd like to clean up the 'drivers' directory and Kconfig menu, at least
> a little. One major thing I noticed is that VLYNQ can actually be
> removed. From patch 2:
>
> ---
> There are no users with a vlynq_driver in the Kernel tree. So, remove
> the bus driver which hardly has seen any activity since 2009. It was
> even marked EXPERIMENTAL as long as that symbol existed. OpenWRT had
> some out-of-tree drivers which they probably intended to upport, but AR7
> devices are not supported anymore because they are "stuck with Kernel
> 3.18" [1]. So, this code can go nowadays.
>
> [1] https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/targets/ar7
> ---
>
> Patch 1 removes MIPS specific bus initialization code which is the only
> user of the VLYNQ bus currently.
>
> Sending out as RFC to gather comments. Patches are based on 6.6-rc1 and
> created with "--irreversible-delete" to save some space. They are
> compile tested only, buildbots were happy.
>
> I think this mainly goes to Florian Fainelli. Florian, what do you
> think?

I'm not Florian, but I worked a bit with AR7 as well, and going
through the (previously) supported/known devices they topped out at 8
MiB Flash and 32 MiB RAM, which isn't enough to run any reasonably
modern OpenWrt even if one would be willing to re-add support for it.

So from my perspective I suggest even dropping the AR7 code entirely.
I seriously doubt anyone is running a modern kernel on that.

Best Regards,
Jonas