Hi Arnd,
On 23/7/19 12:44 am, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Sat, May 4, 2019 at 4:27 PM Greg Ungerer <g...@kernel.org> wrote:
On 4/5/19 3:06 am, Guenter Roeck wrote:
On Fri, May 03, 2019 at 08:16:05AM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:
On Fri, May 3, 2019 at 8:02 AM Greg Ungerer <g...@uclinux.org> wrote:
Ultimately though I am left wondering if the ks8695 support in the
kernel is useful to anyone the way it is at the moment. With a minimal
kernel configuration I can boot up to a shell - but the system is
really unreliable if you try to interactively use it. I don't think
it is the hardware - it seems to run reliably with the old code
it has running from flash on it. I am only testing the new kernel,
running with the existing user space root filesystem on it (which
dates from 2004 :-)
Personally I think it is a bad sign that this subarch and boards do
not have active OpenWrt support, they are routers after all (right?)
and any active use of networking equipment should use a recent
userspace as well, given all the security bugs that popped up over
the years.
Looking around on the internet, I found that Micrel at some point
had their own openwrt fork for ks8695, but I can't find a copy
any more, as the micrel.com domain is no longer used after the
acquisition by Microchip.
I build it with uClinux-dist,
https://sourceforge.net/projects/uclinux/files/uClinux%20Stable/.
And again I can build for it, it just doesn't currently work
in any sort of reasonable way. So I get the impression it
hasn't worked for a while and nobody has noticed.
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Micrel has a list of devices based on
ks8695, and it seems that most of these are rather memory
limited, which is a problem for recent openwrt builds.
Only two of the 17 listed devices have the absolute minimum of 4MB
flash and 32MB RAM for openwrt, two more have 8/32 and one
or two have 4/64, but all these configurations are too limited for the
web U/I now.
With IXP4xx, Gemini and EP93xx we have found active users and
companies selling the chips and reference designs and even
recommending it for new products (!) at times. If this is not the
case with KS8695 and no hobbyists are willing to submit it
to OpenWrt and modernize it to use device tree I think it should be
deleted from the kernel.
That may be the best approach if indeed no one is using it,
much less maintaining it.
Well, I for one don't really use it any more. So I don't have a lot
of motivation to maintain it any longer.
I came across my patches while rebasing my backlog to 5.3-rc1.
Should I save the (very small) trouble of sending them out again
and just remove the platform then?
At this time I have no issue with removing it.
Regards
Greg
