On Mon, 9 Sept 2024 at 18:25, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> On 9/9/24 15:44, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Mon, 9 Sept 2024 at 14:41, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@linaro.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> On 3/9/24 18:06, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >>> This patchset removes the various Arm machines which we deprecated
> >>> for the 9.0 release and are therefore allowed to remove for the 9.2
> >>> release:
> >>> akita, borzoi, cheetah, connex, mainstone, n800, n810,
> >>> spitz, terrier, tosa, verdex, z2
> >>
> >>> The series includes removal of some code which while not strictly
> >>> specific to these machines was in practice used only by them:
> >>> * the OneNAND flash memory device
> >>> * the PCMCIA subsystem
> >>> * the MUSB USB2.0 OTG USB controller chip (hcd-musb)
> >>
> >>> thanks
> >>> -- PMM
> >>>
> >>> Peter Maydell (53):
> >>> hw/input: Drop ADS7846 device
> >>> hw/adc: Remove MAX111X device
> >>> hw/gpio: Remove MAX7310 device
> >>> hw/input: Remove tsc2005 touchscreen controller
> >>> hw/input: Remove tsc210x device
> >>> hw/rtc: Remove twl92230 device
> >>> hw/input: Remove lm832x device
> >>> hw/usb: Remove tusb6010 USB controller
> >>> hw/usb: Remove MUSB USB host controller
> >>
> >> Some of these devices are user-creatable and only rely on a bus
> >> (not a particular removed machine), so could potentially be used
> >> on other maintained machines which expose a similar bus.
> >
> > Which ones in particular? Almost all of them are sysbus.
> > At least one of them that I looked at (lm832x) is an I2C
> > device but it also requires the board to wire up a GPIO line
> > and to call a specific C function to inject key events, so it's
> > not actually generally usable.
> >
> >> We don't have in-tree (tests/) examples, but I wonder if it is OK
> >> to remove them without first explicitly deprecating them in
> >> docs/about/deprecated.rst. I wouldn't surprise users when 9.2 is
> >> release. Maybe this isn't an issue, but I prefer to mention it
> >> now to be sure.
> >
> > I think this is unlikely to be a problem, but if you have
> > a specific device you think might be a problem we can
> > look at whether it seems likely (e.g. whether a web search
> > turns up users using it in odd ways).
>
> I don't have specific example and am happy to remove these
> legacy devices.
>
> I'm wondering more generically about removing user-creatable &
> on-bus devices, when explicit use is removed (deprecated board
> removed), but we can still use them elsewhere. IMHO for clarity
> in the future we should list them in deprecated.rst along with
> some lines like "this device is explicitly used by the FOO machine which
> is being deprecated; if you want to keep them, provide test cases".
Yes, I think that would be a good idea going forward. I didn't
realise in this case that some of the boards used devices that
were i2c or whatever and at least nominally usable elsewhere.
-- PMM