Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 10:01:33 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> To: Ian Lepore <ian@freebsd.org> Cc: Olivier Houchard <mlfbsd@ci0.org>, "freebsd-arm@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arm@freebsd.org>, "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd-rwg@pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> Subject: Re: Retiring two more: Atmel and Xscale Message-ID: <CANCZdfosdYhJSq0giunUMpidHxB7nx41=hZXM_OL8F4HXMSAbw@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <1531496771.66719.50.camel@freebsd.org> References: <CANCZdfqMzSEsrw4n-ciBRWP8%2BB5uBBvF872bJZM38ucQDBWoUg@mail.gmail.com> <201807122111.w6CLBjP2080376@pdx.rh.CN85.dnsmgr.net> <CANCZdfqtpYFt2o7h0dB08dRPiYxtp9iguL5EXnS9iTKxmnN4qg@mail.gmail.com> <20180713095616.GA60331@ci0.org> <1531496771.66719.50.camel@freebsd.org>
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On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 9:46 AM, Ian Lepore <ian@freebsd.org> wrote: > On Fri, 2018-07-13 at 11:56 +0200, Olivier Houchard wrote: > > Hi, > > > > On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 03:54:09PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote: > > > > > > On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Rodney W. Grimes < > > > freebsd-rwg@pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > I'd like to retire Atmel and Xscale support prior to 12. The > > > > > atmel stuff > > > > > has been dodgy for a long time and generally lacks the memory > > > > > to run > > > > > FreeBSD well. We have no current users of it. > > > > > > > > > > The Xscale stuff is old enough to not be relevant. There's no > > > > > known > > > > users. > > > > > > > > > > Part of it is already set to go with the big endian stuff, but > > > > > is there a > > > > > reason to keep the rest? > > > > I thought a depreciation policy was in process to help deal with > > > > all of these. > > > > > > > It will, but these two are no-brainers. The last known users of > > > both of > > > these sub-ports are done with them (Atmel since 8.2, Xscale maybe > > > longer). > > > The one Atmel product I'm aware of will never upgrade past 8.2. The > > > Xscale > > > stuff has not been used even longer in any serious way (since the 7 > > > timeframe, though there were one or two possible single users). > > > > > > If there's no objections, I'll just remove. If there are > > > objections, it > > > will be easy enough to do under that umbrella. > > > > > I think I'm the last known Xscale "user", and I would be more than > > glad > > to see it gone :) > > > > Regards, > > > > Olivier > > > > And I (well, $work) was the last known major user of atmel stuff. We > were never able to get any version of freebsd after 8.2 to be stable > enough on at91 hardware to ship products. That was after investing a > couple hundred hours in trying to track down and fix causes of panics > and disk data corruption in freebsd 9, 10, and 11 on our hardware. I > never tried 12, because $work hasn't been interested in investing any > more resources in such old hardware. > > I'm not convinced freebsd > 8 is really robust any armv4 or v5 systems, > but we do have plenty of reports of "it works for me", so we've been > doing what we can to keep it limping along for those folks. Afaik, that > community is now down to users of Marvell Kirkwood chips (Sheeva and > other *Plug systems). > I know mine have been robust enough to do only toy-level things. My Atmel 11-current board was my dnsmasq server for my development network for a while. USB didn't work, however, and I had to hack the ate driver to fix some issues. I could run it off the SD card or netboot it. The issues that Ian and I had talked about wrt unaligned I/O were present in USB but not mmc. I echo Ian's experience in that I saw all kinds of panics with this between 9-current and 10-current, however. I ran this way only a few weeks, and it wasn't as robust as just dropping in a Banana Pi A20 because the board I had sometimes wouldn't boot right (u-boot issues). I've run the Banana Pi since then w/o thinking about it other than making DNS changes on it. Warner
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