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

[Christophe Leroy]

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.

Christophe