Re: [PATCH 02/13] ARM: remove footbridge

On Tue, Sep 08, 2026 at 07:27:48PM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:

On Tue, Sep 8, 2026 at 5:28 PM Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>

Footbridge was deprecated in 7.3 to be removed along with the other
StrongARM platforms and most remaining board files.

The main machine here is the NetWinder, which was a popular Arm based
desktop PC in the late 1990s and contributed to Arm's later success as
an embedded Linux platform, but was discontinued over 25 years ago and
is no longer all that useful.

I previously tried to convert this to devicetree in a sensible way but
gave up due to the platform being too different from modern SoC based
targets.

Cc: Russell King <linux@armlinux.org.uk>
Cc: Ralph Siemsen <redacted>
Cc: Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
Cc: dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>

Acked-by: Linus Walleij <linusw@kernel.org>

I have one of those machines and it boot mainline but I
certainly consider it a paperweight at this point, I can't use
it for anything useful.

Likewise, I have a NetWinder machine which has occasionally booted a
mainline kernel, along with fairly current buildroot initramfs. It has 
been surprisingly smooth sailing, even the bx/bl compiler troubles seem 
to have been sorted out these days.

It's a bit sad to see it go, in particular since it all works. But the 
reality is that nobody seems to be running this hardware anymore, and 
there is no community of active users anymore.

Acked-by: Ralph Siemsen <redacted>

Regards,
-Ralph