Hi,

What's the best way to find out how long a legacy driver like the 
omap-serial driver will be supported in the kernel going forward?

We've swapped out the 8250 driver for the OMAP serial driver via the 
.config file, since the omap serial driver implements a 485 mode which, 
thus far, appears to be functioning correctly for our application.  On the 
next spin of our board, we plan to realize more 485 channels using the 
omap-serial driver and GPIO lines.

We're currently "baselined" on kernel 4.4.110, but if we need to upgrade to 
a newer kernel version at some point, this could be an issue if the 
OMAP-serial driver is obsoleted in a later kernel. 

As of yet, we haven't tested the RS485 mode which has been implemented in 
the 8250 serial driver in kernel 4.6 and later, but if there are known 
plans for dropping support for the omap-serial driver, then we will 
definitely test the  8250/RS485 implementation.

Thus far have looked at the following, and didn't SEE any plans for 
obsolescence:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master/drivers/tty/serial/omap-serial.c

Also, comments like the following lead me to believe that the omap-serial 
driver will be around as long as the omap platform 
is still supported.  It SOUNDS almost like the 8250 driver is generic for 
other platforms (e.g. other than OMAP) which 
don't support DMA.
 

* Note: This driver is made separate from 8250 driver as we cannot
* over load 8250 driver with omap platform specific configuration for
* features like DMA, it makes easier to implement features like DMA and
* hardware flow control and software flow control configuration with
* this driver as required for the omap-platform


Any insight here would be greatly appreciated..

Thanks!

Jeff

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