On Sat, Jul 24, 2021 at 12:08:30AM +0200, Christian Lamparter wrote:

On 23/07/2021 21:19, Andy Shevchenko wrote:

quoted

On Sun, Sep 06, 2020 at 12:06:10AM +0200, Christian Lamparter wrote:

quoted

I've been holding on to these devices dts' for a while now.
But ever since the recent purge of the PPC405, I'm feeling
the urge to move forward.

The devices in question have been running with OpenWrt since
around 2016/2017. Back then it was linux v4.4 and required
many out-of-tree patches (for WIFI, SATA, CRYPTO...), that
since have been integrated. So, there's nothing else in the
way I think.

A patch that adds the Meraki vendor-prefix has been sent
separately, as there's also the Meraki MR32 that I'm working
on as well. Here's the link to the patch:
<https://lore.kernel.org/linuxppc-dev/20200822154045.16036-1-chunkeey@gmail.com/ (local)>

Now, I've looked around in the arch/powerpc for recent .dts
and device submissions to get an understanding of what is
required.

quoted

From the looks of it, it seems like every device gets a

skeleton defconfig and a CONFIG_$DEVICE symbol (Like:
CONFIG_MERAKI_MR24, CONFIG_WD_MYBOOKLIVE).

Will this be the case? Or would it make sense to further
unite the Bluestone, MR24 and MBL under a common CONFIG_APM82181
and integrate the BLUESTONE device's defconfig into it as well?
(I've stumbled across the special machine compatible
handling of ppc in the Documentation/devicetree/usage-model.rst
already.)

I haven't found any traces of this to be applied. What is the status of this
patch series? And what is the general state of affairs for the PPC44x?

My best guess is: It's complicated. While there was a recent big
UPSET EVENT regarding the My Book Live (MBL) that affected "hundreds"
and "thousands": "An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners"
(<https://lwn.net/Articles/861235/>). Sadly this wasn't getting any
traction.

I can tell that the mentioned Cisco Meraki MR32 (Broadcom ARM SoC)
got merged. So this is off the plate 😌.

But APM821xx sadly went nowhere 😕. One reason being that I haven't
yet posted a V4, V5 and so on...

I will help with testing if needed, please continue this, it's helpful!

In theory, for v4 I would have liked to know how to handle the
kConfig aspect of the series: Would it be "OK" to have a
single CONFIG_APM82181/CONFIG_APM821XX symbol or should there
be a CONFIG_MBL the CONFIG_MR24 (CONFIG_WNDR4700 and CONFIG_MX60W
in the future)?

No idea. Not a PPC maintainer here.

As for the MBL: Well, If you (or any one else) is interested in
having a more up-to-date Debian. Then I have something:

A while back, I made a "build.sh". This will build a
"out-of-the-box" Debian unstable/SID powerpc system image.
This includes sensible NAS defaults + programs as well as
a Cockpit Web-GUI. But also makes it easily possible to do
the DTBs development on the latest vanilla (5.14-rc2 as of
the time of writing this) kernel for the
MyBook Live Single and Duo:

<https://github.com/chunkeey/mbl-debian>

Thanks for the pointer.

I can't really make one for the MR24 though. Its 32MiB NAND
makes it difficult to install anything else than OpenWrt
(and get some use out of the device).

Not interested in MR24, up to you.

So, how to proceed?

At least send a v4 :-)

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko