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

[Olof Johansson]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Scott Branden <sbranden@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 14-09-23 05:54 AM, Matt Porter wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 10:03:39PM -0700, Olof Johansson wrote:
>>>
>>> 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 guess one problem is that BCM_MOBILE is quite misnamed.  It should really
> be called BCM_KONA.  bcm281xx was a successful product in the mobile space.
> But mobile products have short lifespans as new versions become available
> every year.  In fact - there have already been more products made with this
> chipset that are not mobile based nor in the consumer space.  The happen to
> be based on an older kernel version but we are planning on moving to a newer
> kernel version in the future. Variants of this chipset will continue to be
> used in many non-mobile products for many years going forward.  We could
> also rename it BCM_IMMOBILE going forward if that helps clarify things.
>>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>
> Yes, thanks for all the hard work in upstreaming this code.  It will be
> built upon and highly leveraged for other purposes beyond Android phones and
> power management.
>>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>>
>> It won't hurt my feelings if it's decided that it has no value being in
>> the kernel. :) All I can offer is that *maybe* somebody will have a root
>> exploit for the bcm281xx Roku platforms (that lasts) and/or some of the
>> capri and hawaii handsets out there and find it useful as a starting
>> point to work from an Android vendor tree. I don't know if anybody cares
>> about hacking those platforms or not.
>>
>> As mentioned in a followup, the VoIP parts (or some of them, at least)
>> are part of the bcm281xx family and we were expecting them to submit an
>> ethernet driver for the past year. There were repeated reminders that
>> they really care about mainline so I would expect it would be premature
>> to remove that support until we hear from them.
>>
>> -Matt
>>
> Yes, variants of this chipset will be developed in new products. bcm281xx
> was also a poor choice of naming as well. Capri or Kona family would have
> been much more appropriate.  This product is used in VoIP and other
> non-mobile markets.

Ok, cool -- and for those markets having mainline support might
actually make sense. So the answer is fairly simple: Keep it for now.
I'm glad I asked though since it means we have more knowledge of
what's going on with the platform. And hopefully we'll see some of
that missing functionality fill in over time.


-Olof
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