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From:   Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Date:   Tue, 8 Mar 2022 09:19:16 +0100
Message-ID: <CAK8P3a1dUVsZzhAe81usLSkvH29zHgiV9fhEkWdq7_W+nQBWbg@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PULL] remove arch/h8300
To:     Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
        Yoshinori Sato <ysato@users.sourceforge.jp>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-arch <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>,
        "moderated list:H8/300 ARCHITECTURE" 
        <uclinux-h8-devel@lists.sourceforge.jp>
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On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 7:52 AM Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> h8300 hasn't been maintained for quite a while, with even years old
> pull request lingering in the old repo.  Given that it always was
> rather fringe to start with I'd suggest to go ahead and remove the
> port:
>
> The following changes since commit 5c1ee569660d4a205dced9cb4d0306b907fb7599:
>
>   Merge branch 'for-5.17-fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/cgroup (2022-02-22 16:14:35 -0800)
>
> are available in the Git repository at:
>
>   git://git.infradead.org/users/hch/misc.git remove-h8300
>
> for you to fetch changes up to 1c4b5ecb7ea190fa3e9f9d6891e6c90b60e04f24:
>
>   remove the h8300 architecture (2022-02-23 08:52:50 +0100)

I agree, this is clearly the least actively maintained architecture we
have at the moment,
and probably the least useful. It is now the only one that does not
support MMUs at all,
and most of the boards only support 4MB of RAM, out of which the
defconfig kernel
needs more than half just for .text/.data.

Guenter Roeck did the original patch to remove the architecture in 2013 after it
had already been obsolete for a while, and Yoshinori Sato brought it back in
a much more modern form in 2015. Looking at the git history since the
reinstantiation,
it's clear that even he barely cared, almost all commits in the tree
are build fixes or
cross-architecture cleanups:

$ git log --no-merges --format=%an v4.5.. arch/h8300/  | sort | uniq
-c | sort -rn | head -n 12
     25 Masahiro Yamada
     18 Christoph Hellwig
     14 Mike Rapoport
      9 Arnd Bergmann
      8 Mark Rutland
      7 Peter Zijlstra
      6 Kees Cook
      6 Ingo Molnar
      6 Al Viro
      5 Randy Dunlap
      4 Yury Norov
      4 Yoshinori Sato

If there are no other objections, I'll just queue this up for 5.18 in
the asm-generic
tree along with the nds32 removal.

          Arnd