On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 12:38 AM, James Hogan [off-list ref] wrote:

These patches remove the metag architecture and tightly dependent
drivers from the kernel. With the 4.16 kernel the ancient gcc 4.2.4
based metag toolchain we have been using is hitting compiler bugs, so
now seems a good time to drop it altogether.

Quoting from patch 1:

The earliest Meta architecture port of Linux I have a record of was an
import of a Meta port of Linux v2.4.1 in February 2004, which was worked
on significantly over the next few years by Graham Whaley, Will Newton,
Matt Fleming, myself and others.

Eventually the port was merged into mainline in v3.9 in March 2013, not
long after Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies and shifted
its CPU focus over to the MIPS architecture.

As a result, though the port was maintained for a while, kept on life
support for a while longer, and useful for testing a few specific
drivers for which I don't have ready access to the equivalent MIPS
hardware, it is now essentially dead with no users.

It is also stuck using an out-of-tree toolchain based on GCC 4.2.4 which
is no longer maintained, now struggles to build modern kernels due to
toolchain bugs, and doesn't itself build with a modern GCC. The latest
buildroot port is still using an old uClibc snapshot which is no longer
served, and the latest uClibc doesn't build with GCC 4.2.4.

So lets call it a day and drop the Meta architecture port from the
kernel. RIP Meta.

I've pulled it into my asm-generic tree now, which is also part of linux-next,
and followed up with patches removing frv, m32r, score, unicore32
and blackfin. I have not removed the device drivers yet, but I'm working
on that.

       Arnd
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html