Re: [OpenWrt-Devel] ar71xx support in mainline kernel?

[Felix Fietkau <nbd@openwrt.org>]

On 2011-11-26 1:33 PM, Dave Taht wrote:
> I am curious as to if anyone was working on getting the ar71xx arch and
> drivers upstream?
> 
> It appears that the ath79 arch was intended to be the same thing, but has
> nearly no users in the upstream kernel aside from two boards, and was last
> worked on back in april...
> 
> the ar71xx patches in openwrt supports 43 boards at present and a
> great deal of additional (and possibly duplicated) functionality.
> 
> http://nbd.name/gitweb.cgi?p=openwrt.git;a=tree;f=target/linux/ar71xx/files/arch/mips/ar71xx;h=878ba990e3b04c98e5e244011a82177e465f405a;hb=HEAD
> 
> So I'm curious as to what were the show-stoppers aside from the name change
> and the huge backlog of boards and specialized devices?
> 
> (I see that the usb drivers are different, and I have no idea if the ag71xx
>  ethernet driver is actually in there in some form under some name)
> 
> (msg somewhat triggered by seeing the drivers/net directory getting
> re-organized in linux 3.2 and trying to hack in BQL on top of the
> existing patchset)
I think it does not make much sense to try to integrate the code from
our ar71xx into ath79 and pushing that upstream. The mips-machine way of
supporting different boards with one kernel is somewhat cumbersome, a
much better way to deal with it is adding device tree support and using
that. Proper device tree support is currently being worked on for the
lantiq target. Once that's functional, I'll look into adapting it to
ath79 as well.

- Felix