Re: Old platforms: bring out your dead

Hi Rob,

On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 8:58 AM Rob Landley [off-list ref] wrote:

On 1/12/21 4:46 PM, Linus Walleij wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 3:45 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Yeah, I have the same impression that's the strong commercial interest pushes
hobbyist use of the Linux kernel a bit down. A lot of these changes feel like
they're motivated by corporate decisions.

There has to be a healthy balance between hobbyist and commercial use. I understand
that from a commercial point of view, it doesn't make much sense to run Linux
on a 30-year-old computer. But it's a hobbyist project for many people and hacking
Linux stuff for these old machines has a very entertaining and educational factor.

This is actually one of the most interesting things written in this discussion.

I have both revamped and deleted subarchitectures in the ARM tree. We
never deleted anyone's pet project *unless* they were clearly unwilling to
work on it (such as simply testning new patches) and agreed that it will
not go on.

Another fun aspect of old hardware is it serves as prior art for patents. The
j-core hardware implementation schedule has in part been driven by specific
patents expiring, as in "we can't do $FEATURE until $DATE".

Indeed, so that's why the release of j4 is postponed to 2016...
/me runs date (again).

When I did an sh4 porting contract in 2018 I got that board updated to a
current-ish kernel (3 versions back from then-current it hit some intermittent
nor flash filesystem corruption that only occurred intermittently under
sustained load; had to ship so I backed off one version and never tracked it
down). But these days I'm not always on the same continent as my two actual sh4
hardware boards, have never gotten my physical sh2 board to boot, and $DAYJOB is
all j-core stuff not sh4.

Which is not upstream, investing in the future?

Testing that a basic superh system still builds and boots under qemu and j-core
I can commit to doing regularly. Testing specific hardware devices on boards I
don't regularly use is a lot harder.

I have the sh7751-based landisk in my board farm, so it's receiving
regular boot testing.  That's one of the simpler SH-based platforms,
though.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds