Re: [PATCH] ARM: mach-bcm: offer a new maintainer and process

[Florian Fainelli]

2014-09-22 22:03 GMT-07:00 Olof Johansson <olof@xxxxxxxxx>:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 11:17:11AM -0700, Florian Fainelli wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As some of you may have seen in the news, Broadcom has recently stopped
>> its mobile SoC activities. Upstream support for Broadcom's Mobile SoCs
>> was an effort initially started by Christian Daudt and his team, and then
>> continued by Alex Eleder and Matter Porter assigned to a particular landing
>> team within Linaro to help Broadcom doing so.
>>
>> As part of this effort, Christian and Matt volunteered for centralizing pull
>> requests coming from the arch/arm/mach-bcm/* directory and as of today, they
>> are still responsible for merging mach-bcm pull requests coming from brcmstb,
>> bcm5301x, bcm2835 and bcm63xx, creating an intermediate layer to the arm-soc
>> tree.
>>
>> Following the mobile group shut down, our group (in which Brian, Gregory, Marc,
>> Kevin and myself are) inherited these mobile SoC platforms, although at this
>> point we cannot comment on the future of mobile platforms, we know that our
>> Linaro activities have been stopped.
>>
>> We have not heard much from Christian and Matt in a while, and some of our pull
>> requests have been stalling as a result. We would like to offer both a new
>> maintainer for the mobile platforms as well as reworking the pull request
>> process:
>>
>> - our group has now full access to these platforms, putting us in the best
>>   position to support Mobile SoCs questions
>
> So, one question I have is whether it makes sense to keep the mobile
> platforms in the kernel if the line of business is ending?

I leave it to Scott for more details, but last we talked he mentioned
what has been upstreamed is useful for some other platforms he cares
about.

>
> While I truly do appreciate the work done by Matt and others, there's
> also little chance that it'll see substantial use by anyone. The Capri
> boards aren't common out in the wild and I'm not aware of any dev
> boards or consumer products with these SoCs that might want to run
> mainline? Critical things such as power management and graphics are
> missing from the current platform support in the kernel, so nobody is
> likely to want it on their Android phone, etc.
>
> Maybe the answer to this is "keep it for now, revisit sometime later",
> which is perfectly sane -- it has practically no cost to keep it around
> the way it's looking now.

Right, let's adopt that approach for now, and we can revisit that
later in light of Scott and his group's work.
--
Florian
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