Re: [RFC} arm architecture board/feature deprecation timeline

Two small additions:

On Mon, Aug 19, 2024, at 11:17, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024, at 21:53, jeremy@jeremypeper.com wrote:
I expect that the terastation pro2 is going to be fairly easy to
convert to DT as there is already support for similar Orion5x
machines. In this case I would just remove all the Orion5x board
files and you can add a dts file later on. The bit I'm unsure
about here is legacy PCI support. I see that the board file enables
both PCI and PCIe, but I don't know if both are actually used,
or if everything is on PCIe.

I have some old patches for separating orion legacy PCI from
PCIe support, as only the latter has a modern driver (shared
with kirkwood and armadaxp). If you can confirm that the machine
actually uses PCI, I can dig those out from my backups.

I did find this myself later, the machine does use an on-board
PCI connected SATA controller, which is obviously required to
make the machine useful.

Doing a PCI host bridge driver with DT support correctly is
a lot of work, especially if there is only a single machine
using it. Since this uses the same drivers/ata/sata-mv.c
driver as the other orion/kirkwood machines, I wonder if we
can just pretend that this is a platform device and skip
all of the PCI probing. I think this only needs a few
small changes to the sata-mv.c driver, but it does require
that the PCI bus is left in a known state by the boot loader.

The WXL machine is going to be more work since there is currently
no DT support for mv78xx0, but everything except the pin controller
should at least have a driver since this SoC is somewhere between
Kirkwood and Dove. Having a hack for the pin controller similar
to what orion5x has is probably fine, especially if you only
need to support one machine.

The complication here is that removing the board file would
imply that all of the mv78xx0 code immediately becomes dead
code. I guess the next best idea is to remove the orion5x
and dove board files first and then move bits of plat-orion
that are actually used by the WXL machine into the mv78xx0
directory.

      Arnd