Re: [PATCH] Remove support for score architecture

From: Guenter Roeck
Date: Wed Sep 04 2013 - 00:19:28 EST


On 09/02/2013 09:54 PM, Liqin Chen wrote:

2013/9/3 Guenter Roeck <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:linux@xxxxxxxxxxxx>>

On 09/02/2013 08:18 AM, Lennox Wu wrote:

Before we start the development of the S+core, Sunplus had licensed
ARM and MIPS. We develop S+core for other reason such as the price.
Some products on the web of Sunplus adopt S+core , for example
the SPV7050.(http://w3.sunplus.__com/products/spv7050.asp <http://w3.sunplus.com/products/spv7050.asp>) These products
could still be bought from the market. Some high-end products adopt
ARM or MIPS. So, there is no conflict for a company adopts multiple
architectures.

As I said, we recognize that we rarely update because of the limited
applications and rare requests from customers. Maybe we don’t
understand the culture enough; we think that it is unnecessary if we
have no new bugs or new functions, the thought seems wrong. We can
commit some patches in the near future.


The point is not about submitting patches, it is about maintaining the code.
Even if you don't add functionality, one would expect that you ensure that
new kernel versions compile and run on your hardware.

Since January 2012, 68 patches have been applied to arch/score, pretty
much all of them addressing kernel API changes or global cleanup.
Only two of them got an Ack by one of the score maintainers.
This strongly suggests that you don't keep track of what is going on,
and at the very least raises the question if you do compile and test
new kernel versions on a regular basis. Even if you do, no one knows
about it, because ....

As part of this process, I would expect the architecture maintainer to
accept incoming patches, test the same, and send pull requests to Linus.
The last time this happened was early 2011; since then all score patches
were sent to Linus through Andrew and a few other maintainers.
Actually, I don't see many signoffs from a score maintainer at all,
even from the very beginning.

As pointed out, the MAINTAINERS entry for score points to a
non-existing domain, as does the e-mail address of one of the
maintainers.

I would not call that "maintained".



Hi Al Viro, Guenter Roeck, Arnd Bergmann and all,

I still supports the S+core team to maintain their codes, although I
left sunplus co. in 2011.

I keep reading the mailing list and testing these patches for S+core,
I think the main problems are they have not echoed to any comments on
score's questions. Maybe they think the current situation is good
enough for their customers, and they don’t understand the rules of the
group enough. Even so, they should update score code to the latest
status, include my mail address.

We will discuss how to maintain the code of S+core. However, if all of
you and Linus also think the S+core should be removed from the
upstream, we will do it.


Trying to build gcc for score says:

*** Configuration score-unknown-elf is obsolete.
*** Specify --enable-obsolete to build it anyway.
*** Support will be REMOVED in the next major release of GCC,
*** unless a maintainer comes forward.

That does not sound very encouraging.

Guenter

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