Hi Ladis, On 28/12/22 02:00, Ladislav Michl wrote: > Hi there, > > Octeon ethernet drivers were once kicked out of staging, just to be > returned back a while after: > https://scanmail.trustwave.com/?c=20988&d=_eyq4wb_Cf8A27MjylFU_gZpLMEEtZOmwZm-lqT0RQ&u=https%3a%2f%2flore%2ekernel%2eorg%2flkml%2f20200205001116%2e14096-1-chris%2epackham%40alliedtelesis%2eco%2enz%2f > > All that patchset ends with an optimistic comment: > On Wed, 2020-03-04 Chris Packham wrote: >> I have had a reply from Marvell. They've contracted support for the old >> Cavium Octeon designs out to an external company. I'm not sure that >> means that we'll see some action on these drivers any time soon but at >> least they're doing something. > Now based on Marvell's 277 patches long set against 5.4.30 it seems that > 'an external company' is Wipro and 'doing something' is the exact opposite > to 'make driver self-contained' as described in drivers/staging/octeon/TODO > > That patchset contains dozen of *Sync-up-SE* patches which basically dumps > mainline changes and replaces platform files with the BSD licensed ones > common for Linux, U-Boot and Cavium tools. Ethernet driver is then synced > to that changes, making it even more dependent on arch/mips/cavium-octeon > code. > > To fix staging driver to work with customer's CN7020 based board I'd had to > either go Marvell's direction or use DT for driver configuration, so I > partially did the latter. It is probably broken for anything else than > CN70XX and it breaks the ABI, newer kernel will not work with older > bindings. Is that okay for staging drivers? Does anyone even intend to > use mainline kernel with Octeon SoCs? Of course I'd be happy hearing > something changed at Marvell and they are willing to mainline support > for their MIPS based SoCs ;-) From our end we still have our Octeon MIPS based routers which we still want to support but for various reasons these aren't seeing the kernel updates that I might like. And because these are technically legacy I'm having a hard time convincing anyone to dedicate any resources to helping with any effort to improve these drivers (whatever is happening is just "spare time" work). As a user I can say that we'd probably be OK if we had to make some dts updates as we ship our kernel+dtb+initrd as a FIT image so we can update the kernel+dtb at the same time if necessary.
