|
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.
Cc: Chris Metcalf <[email protected]>
Cc: John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <[email protected]>
Link: http://www.mellanox.com/page/npu_multicore_overview
Link: https://jenkins.debian.net/view/rebootstrap/job/rebootstrap_tilegx_gcc7/
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
|
|
The first version of this patch proposed an arch/tile/drivers/ directory,
but the consensus was that this was probably a poor choice for a place to
group Tilera-specific drivers, and that in any case grouping by platform
was discouraged, and grouping by function was preferred.
This version of the patch addresses various issues raised in the
community, primarily the absence of sysfs integration. The sysfs
integration now handles passing information on sector size, page size,
and total partition size to userspace as well. In addition, we now
use a single "struct cdev" to manage all the partition minor devices,
and dynamically discover the correct number of partitions from the
hypervisor rather than using a module_param with a default value.
This driver has no particular "peer" drivers it can be grouped with.
It is sort of like an MTD driver for SPI ROM, but it doesn't group well
with the other MTD devices since it relies on hypervisor virtualization
to handle many of the irritating aspects of flash ROM management: sector
awareness, background read for sub-sector writes, bit examination to
determine whether a sector erase needs to be issued, etc. It is in fact
more like an EEPROM driver, but the hypervisor virtualization does require
a "flush" command if you wish to commit a sector write prior to writing
to a different sector, and this is sufficiently different from generic
I2C/SPI EEPROMs that as a result it doesn't group well with them either.
The simple character device is already in use by a range of Tilera
SPI ROM management tools, as well as by customers. In addition, using
the simple character device actually simplifies the userspace tools,
since they don't need to manage sector erase, background read, etc.
This both simplifies the code (since we can uniformly manage plain files
and the SPI ROM) as well as makes the user code portable to non-Linux
platforms that don't offer the same MTD ioctls.
Signed-off-by: Chris Metcalf <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
|