On Fri, May 03, 2019 at 08:16:05AM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote: > On Fri, May 3, 2019 at 8:02 AM Greg Ungerer <gerg@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > I dug out some old ks8695 based hardware to try this out. > > I had a lot of trouble getting anything modern working on it. > > In the end I still don't have a reliable test bed to test this properly. > > What is usually used by old ARMv4 systems is OpenWrt or > OpenEmbedded. Those is the only build systems that reliably > produce a userspace for these things now, and it is also the > appropriate size for this kind of systems. > > > Ultimately though I am left wondering if the ks8695 support in the > > kernel is useful to anyone the way it is at the moment. With a minimal > > kernel configuration I can boot up to a shell - but the system is > > really unreliable if you try to interactively use it. I don't think > > it is the hardware - it seems to run reliably with the old code > > it has running from flash on it. I am only testing the new kernel, > > running with the existing user space root filesystem on it (which > > dates from 2004 :-) > > Personally I think it is a bad sign that this subarch and boards do > not have active OpenWrt support, they are routers after all (right?) > and any active use of networking equipment should use a recent > userspace as well, given all the security bugs that popped up over > the years. > > With IXP4xx, Gemini and EP93xx we have found active users and > companies selling the chips and reference designs and even > recommending it for new products (!) at times. If this is not the > case with KS8695 and no hobbyists are willing to submit it > to OpenWrt and modernize it to use device tree I think it should be > deleted from the kernel. > That may be the best approach if indeed no one is using it, much less maintaining it. Guenter
