On Sat, Feb 25, 2023, at 17:50, Paul Gortmaker wrote: > [RE: [RFC PATCH 0/4] Remove some e300/MPC83xx evaluation platforms] On > 24/02/2023 (Fri 21:16) Leo Li wrote: > > Thanks for confirming with your marketing team that they "do not > recommend any new design with these SoCs" -- it also confirms the > information I read on the web pages for the platforms. > > As those of us immersed in this world all know from the 101 basics of > Product Life Cycle lessons, it doesn't matter if it is a phone or a > set-top-box/PVR or whatever else kind of non-PC consumer device -- > kernel uprevs never happen in that product space. > > So with the best interests of the mainline kernel in mind, I think we > are good to proceed with this for summer 2023. And of course as I've > said many times before - the kernel is in git, so really you can't > delete anything anyway - it remains in history forever.
Thanks for working on this, this is a good step towards removing the known unused code. One aspect I'd add from doing similar cleanups on arm32 is that I would prioritize removing evaluation platforms for SoCs that have no other supported boards, and then garbage-collecting the device drivers that become unused. I'm not sure where the RDB boards fit in that, in particular if an unmodified kernel would work on a machine that is derived from the reference platform, or if it really only works on the machine itself. On most arm platforms, we moved to having only per-soc "compatible" strings, but on Freescale ppc32 it appears that the kernel always matches a board specific string and requires patches in order to support anything else. Arnd