Retiring two more: Atmel and Xscale

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 9:46 AM, Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 2018-07-13 at 11:56 +0200, Olivier Houchard wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 03:54:09PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Rodney W. Grimes <
> > > freebsd-rwg at pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > I'd like to retire Atmel and Xscale support prior to 12. The
> > > > > atmel stuff
> > > > > has been dodgy for a long time and generally lacks the memory
> > > > > to run
> > > > > FreeBSD well. We have no current users of it.
> > > > >
> > > > > The Xscale stuff is old enough to not be relevant. There's no
> > > > > known
> > > > users.
> > > > >
> > > > > Part of it is already set to go with the big endian stuff, but
> > > > > is there a
> > > > > reason to keep the rest?
> > > > I thought a depreciation policy was in process to help deal with
> > > > all of these.
> > > >
> > > It will, but these two are no-brainers. The last known users of
> > > both of
> > > these sub-ports are done with them (Atmel since 8.2, Xscale maybe
> > > longer).
> > > The one Atmel product I'm aware of will never upgrade past 8.2. The
> > > Xscale
> > > stuff has not been used even longer in any serious way (since the 7
> > > timeframe, though there were one or two possible single users).
> > >
> > > If there's no objections, I'll just remove. If there are
> > > objections, it
> > > will be easy enough to do under that umbrella.
> > >
> > I think I'm the last known Xscale "user", and I would be more than
> > glad
> > to see it gone :)
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Olivier
> >
>
> And I (well, $work) was the last known major user of atmel stuff. We
> were never able to get any version of freebsd after 8.2 to be stable
> enough on at91 hardware to ship products. That was after investing a
> couple hundred hours in trying to track down and fix causes of panics
> and disk data corruption in freebsd 9, 10, and 11 on our hardware. I
> never tried 12, because $work hasn't been interested in investing any
> more resources in such old hardware.
>
> I'm not convinced freebsd > 8 is really robust any armv4 or v5 systems,
> but we do have plenty of reports of "it works for me", so we've been
> doing what we can to keep it limping along for those folks. Afaik, that
> community is now down to users of Marvell Kirkwood chips (Sheeva and
> other *Plug systems).
>

I know mine have been robust enough to do only toy-level things. My Atmel
11-current board was my dnsmasq server for my development network for a
while. USB didn't work, however, and I had to hack the ate driver to fix
some issues. I could run it off the SD card or netboot it. The issues that
Ian and I had talked about wrt unaligned I/O were present in USB but not
mmc. I echo Ian's experience in that I saw all kinds of panics with this
between 9-current and 10-current, however. I ran this way only a few weeks,
and it wasn't as robust as just dropping in a Banana Pi A20 because the
board I had sometimes wouldn't boot right (u-boot issues). I've run the
Banana Pi since then w/o thinking about it other than making DNS changes on
it.

Warner