On 24/02/18 03:10, Guenter Roeck wrote:
On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 03:43:16PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
Regarding the older architectures I mentioned (m32r, frv, mn10300),
the situation is a bit different as they don't have the problems with
build testing but they do have problems with using less of the
standard interfaces (syscall, timer, gpio, rtc, ...), so they do add
more to the maintenance burden without the nostalgia value of
some of the even older architectures (parisc, alpha, m68k, ia64)
that people maintain mainly for fun.
IMHO the magic word is 'maintain'. If someone is actively maintaining it
then I don't think we should care too much, if not then while the code
may be buildable on current systems does anyone honestly think it works
properly if used in anger ?
FWIW, alpha and m68k are known boot with qemu (even though m68k
generates a warning traceback with the mainline kernel).
At the very least I build every defconfig for every rc and release
kernel for m68k. I also run a ColdFire build through qemu (non-MMU)
and also run it and an MMU build on real hardware. So they are
always checked and by far mostly work - and when they don't I fix
it ASAP.
I am pretty sure Geert does similar for the traditional 68k targets.
NXP still sell ColdFire parts, so for the moment it is not dead
in terms of available silicon.
(*) I know linux-4.16-rc1 and rc2 issue a warning on boot of a
non-MMU m68k/coldfire build due to the addition of a warning by
Christoph in 205e1b7f51e4 ("dma-mapping: warn when there is no
coherent_dma_mask") but I haven't had a chance to track what the
exact problem is there.
Regards
Greg
