Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org designates 2620:137:e000::3:8 as permitted sender) client-ip=2620:137:e000::3:8;
MIME-Version: 1.0
References: <20230916091125.3221-1-wsa@kernel.org>
In-Reply-To: <20230916091125.3221-1-wsa@kernel.org>
From:   Jonas Gorski <jonas.gorski@gmail.com>
Date:   Sat, 16 Sep 2023 13:11:41 +0200
Message-ID: <CAOiHx=kLQzTTzuGM0tyuv=e9J3Oi7EbWWYFRK5mEfqNrVj05NQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] vlynq: remove bus support
To:     Wolfram Sang <wsa@kernel.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Wolfram Sang <wsa+renesas@sang-engineering.com>,
        linux-mips@vger.kernel.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Precedence: bulk

On Sat, 16 Sept 2023 at 11:18, Wolfram Sang <wsa@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> From: Wolfram Sang <wsa+renesas@sang-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