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 Chris
