Re: [PATCH 06/16] arch: remove tile port

From: Arnd Bergmann
Date: Fri Mar 16 2018 - 04:12:35 EST


On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 2:23 AM, Chris Metcalf <metcalf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 3/14/2018 10:36 AM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>
>> The Tile architecture port was added by Chris Metcalf in 2010, and
>> maintained until early 2018 when he orphaned it due to his departure
>> from Mellanox, and nobody else stepped up to maintain it. The product
>> line is still around in the form of the BlueField SoC, but no longer
>> uses the Tile architecture.
>>
>> There are also still products for sale with Tile-GX SoCs, notably the
>> Mikrotik CCR router family. The products all use old (linux-3.3) kernels
>> with lots of patches and won't be upgraded by their manufacturers. There
>> have been efforts to port both OpenWRT and Debian to these, but both
>> projects have stalled and are very unlikely to be continued in the future.
>>
>> Given that we are reasonably sure that nobody is still using the port
>> with an upstream kernel any more, it seems better to remove it now while
>> the port is in a good shape than to let it bitrot for a few years first.
>
>
> Arnd, thanks for dealing with this.
>
> There are a number of tile-specific driver files that are mostly called out
> in the MAINTAINERS file. I would expect you should also delete those.
>
>
> -F: drivers/char/tile-srom.c
> -F: drivers/edac/tile_edac.c
> -F: drivers/net/ethernet/tile/
> -F: drivers/rtc/rtc-tile.c
> -F: drivers/tty/hvc/hvc_tile.c
> -F: drivers/tty/serial/tilegx.c
> -F: drivers/usb/host/*-tilegx.c
> -F: include/linux/usb/tilegx.h

Right. I covered all of those in my follow-up driver series, see
https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/3/14/579

It's all in linux-next as of yesterday, but thanks for paying attention here.

Arnd