QEMU includes some models of old Arm machine types which are
a bit problematic for us because:
* they're written in a very old way that uses numerous APIs that we
would like to get away from (eg they don't use qdev, they use
qemu_system_reset_request(), they use vmstate_register(), etc)
* they've been that way for a decade plus and nobody particularly has
stepped up to try to modernise the code (beyond some occasional
work here and there)
* we often don't have test cases for them, which means that if we
do try to do the necessary refactoring work on them we have no
idea if they even still work at all afterwards
All these machine types are also of hardware that has largely passed
away into history and where I would not be surprised to find that
e.g. the Linux kernel support was never tested on real hardware
any more.
After some consultation with the Linux kernel developers, we
are going to deprecate:
All PXA2xx machines:
akita Sharp SL-C1000 (Akita) PDA (PXA270)
borzoi Sharp SL-C3100 (Borzoi) PDA (PXA270)
connex Gumstix Connex (PXA255)
mainstone Mainstone II (PXA27x)
spitz Sharp SL-C3000 (Spitz) PDA (PXA270)
terrier Sharp SL-C3200 (Terrier) PDA (PXA270)
tosa Sharp SL-6000 (Tosa) PDA (PXA255)
verdex Gumstix Verdex Pro XL6P COMs (PXA270)
z2 Zipit Z2 (PXA27x)
All OMAP2 machines:
n800 Nokia N800 tablet aka. RX-34 (OMAP2420)
n810 Nokia N810 tablet aka. RX-44 (OMAP2420)
One of the OMAP1 machines:
cheetah Palm Tungsten|E aka. Cheetah PDA (OMAP310)
Rationale:
* for QEMU dropping individual machines is much less beneficial
than if we can drop support for an entire SoC
* the OMAP2 QEMU code in particular is large, old and unmaintained,
and none of the OMAP2 kernel maintainers said they were using
QEMU in any of their testing/development
* although there is a setup that is booting test kernels on some
of the PXA2xx machines, nobody seemed to be using them as part
of their active kernel development and my impression from the
email thread is that PXA is the closest of all these SoC families
to being dropped from the kernel soon
* nobody said they were using cheetah, so it's entirely
untested and quite probably broken
* on the other hand the OMAP1 sx1 model does seem to be being
used as part of kernel development, and there was interest
in keeping collie around
In particular, the mainstone, tosa and z2 machine types have
already been dropped from Linux.
Mark all these machine types as deprecated.
Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@linaro.org>
Message-id: 20240308171621.3749894-1-peter.maydell@linaro.org
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