[U-Boot] U-Boot PXA support

[Marcel Ziswiler]

Hi Tom

On Wed, 2019-05-29 at 10:12 -0400, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 02:53:55PM +0000, Marcel Ziswiler wrote:
> > Hi Tom
> > 
> > On Mon, 2019-05-06 at 09:26 -0400, Tom Rini wrote:
> > > Hey folks,
> > > 
> > > I'm attempting, again, to see what we need to do in order to use
> > > gcc-
> > > 8.x
> > > for U-Boot and ran into, again:
> > > https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/920329/ which in short is that
> > > when
> > > using -mcpu=xscale gcc-8.x throws an odd error:
> > > cc1: error: switch -mcpu=xscale conflicts with -march=armv5te
> > > switch
> > > [-Werror]
> > > 
> > > Now note, U-Boot isn't passing -march= at all, just -mcpu=xscale
> > > which
> > > suggests perhaps something broke in upstream gcc.  Looking at the
> > > kernel, it's not used -mcpu=xscale ever, just -mtune=xscale but
> > > that
> > > leads to different failures (seen here with gcc-7.3):
> > >   CC      drivers/usb/gadget/pxa25x_udc.o
> > > {standard input}: Assembler messages:
> > > {standard input}:779: Error: selected processor does not support
> > > `pld
> > > [lr]' in ARM mode
> > > {standard input}:1201: Error: selected processor does not support
> > > `pld [r7]' in ARM mode
> > > {standard input}:2519: Error: selected processor does not support
> > > `pld [r3]' in ARM mode
> > > {standard input}:2796: Error: selected processor does not support
> > > `pld [r3]' in ARM mode
> > > 
> > > So, what should we do about this?  Is there still active interest
> > > in
> > > supporting the PXA platforms?  Thanks folks!
> > 
> > We are actually still shipping Colibri PXA270 modules for another
> > one
> > or two years I believe after which Marvell stops selling us chips.
> > 
> > The strange thing is that I build U-Boot master more or less daily
> > without any known issues currently using the regular gcc 8.2
> > 2019.01
> > tool chain from ARM.
> > 
> > The only issue is the missing DM_MMC and/or DM_USB conversion which
> > I
> > started working on a long time ago but never came around properly
> > debugging. I may pick that one up tomorrow again.
> 
> I want to circle back to this.  Thanks again for confirming that
> other
> toolchains are happy here (and figuring out a path forward for
> everyone
> is on my TODO list still).  And I agree we need to figure out
> something
> about the size growth.  But this still leaves one question
> open.  There
> are, after dropping zipitz2, 2 PXA platforms.

Let me name those two:

- Colibri PXA270

Our customers already had to commit to a last-time-buy and we will
phasing out shipments next year. I don't think anybody is doing any new
designs with them since quite a while.

- HP iPAQ Pocket PC h2200

A consumer device with PXA255 from back in 2002. There has not been any
activity on h2200 from its maintainer Lukasz Dalek for almost 5 years
now. Without anybody actually owning such hardware stepping up it will
be quite impossible to maintain.

> Do you want to take over
> the MAINTAINER role from Marek for them?

While I would love to do so I really don't think that makes too much
sense at all. We probably should just drop PXA support entirely, move
on and concentrate our resources on newer stuff like e.g. my patch sets
for Apalis iMX8 and Colibri iMX8X which did not get any more attention
since more resp. almost a month now.

Cheers

Marcel