Re: Deprecate the ppc405 boards in QEMU? (was: [PATCH v3 4/7] MAINTAINERS: Orphan obscure ppc platforms)

[Cédric Le Goater]

On 10/1/21 15:04, Christophe Leroy wrote:
> Le 01/10/2021 à 14:04, Thomas Huth a écrit :
> > On 01/10/2021 13.12, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > > On Fri, 1 Oct 2021 at 10:43, Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > Nevertheless, as long as nobody has a hint where to find that
> > > > ppc405_rom.bin, I think both boards are pretty useless in QEMU (as far as I
> > > > can see, they do not work without the bios at all, so it's also not possible
> > > > to use a Linux image with the "-kernel" CLI option directly).
> > >
> > > It is at least in theory possible to run bare-metal code on
> > > either board, by passing either a pflash or a bios argument.
> >
> > True. I did some more research, and seems like there was once support for those 
> > boards in u-boot, but it got removed there a couple of years ago already:
> >
> > https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/u-boot/-/commit/98f705c9cefdf
> >
> > https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/u-boot/-/commit/b147ff2f37d5b
> >
> > https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/u-boot/-/commit/7514037bcdc37
> >
> > > But I agree that there seem to be no signs of anybody actually
> > > successfully using these boards for anything, so we should
> > > deprecate-and-delete them.
> >
> > Yes, let's mark them as deprecated now ... if someone still uses them and 
> > speaks up, we can still revert the deprecation again.
>
>
> I really would like to be able to use them to validate Linux Kernel changes, 
> hence looking for that missing BIOS.
>
> If we remove ppc405 from QEMU, we won't be able to do any regression tests of 
> Linux Kernel on those processors.

It's nice to have I agree.

Someone needs to find the right u-boot level and certainly also,
a host old enough to support the compiler options. May be, a RH6
ppc64 VM or an old ppc32 debian image running under QEMU or
some MAC.

Tell me if you need some help to get a system/image.

C.