[PATCH v5 0/4] ARM: ep93xx: ts72xx: Add support for BK3 board

Hi Arnd,

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Alexander Sverdlin
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Wed Dec 13 08:34:22 2017 Linus Walleij
[off-list ref] wrote:  

quoted

Arnd has been nudging me to do DT conversion for EP93xx
so if there are many active industrial users of these
I should prioritize it, because these things have 20+ years
support cycles.  

I'm not sure how important or necessary at all is to change
anything in these legacy platforms.  

I suspect that at several points in the next 5 to 10 years, we will
remove additional platforms or CPU types, as we tend to do when a
platform becomes a maintenance burden and is clearly not used by
anyone.

I suppose that at least the last argument is not the case here :-).

It's hard to predict in advance what triggers the removal, but as the
number of platforms that are not using DT or ARCH_MULTIPLATFORM
goes down to a small number, there will be increased interested in
either removing or converting the remaining ones. This is not an
immediate danger at the moment, since we still have 14 platforms that
are not using ARCH_MULTIPLATFORM, and 23 that have remaining
board files, but you don't want to be the last user of the last
platform after the other ones are done ;-)

:-)

quoted

quoted

We also need to think about upholding support in GCC for
ARMv4(t) for the foreseeable future if there is a big web of
random deeply embedded systems out there that will need
updates.  

But we should definitely preserve at least what we have.  

Plain ARMv4 (and earlier) support in gcc is already marked
'deprecated' and will likely be gone in gcc-8 (it's still there as of
last week). ARMv4T is going to be around for a while, and you can
even keep building for ARMv4 using "-march=armv4t -marm" when linking
with 'ld --fix-v4bx'.

I think that we shall start complaining on the gcc-devel mailing list
now.

I would be hard to wake up in 2 years time and realise that we don't
have a modern compiler.

Debian recently did a survey to find out whether there were still
users on ARMv4 or ARMv4T, and the result was that probably everyone is
on ARMv5E or ARMv6 for the ARM port (which is separate from the
ARMHF port that is ARMv7+). See also
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2017/11/msg00379.html
and let them know quickly if you use Debian stable releases and
plan to update to Debian 10 (Buster) in the future.

     Arnd

Best regards,

Lukasz Majewski

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