Re: Future of 32-bit platforms (including i386)

On Mon, Aug 14, 2023 at 01:08:18PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 1:05 PM Ed Maste <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 24 May 2023 at 02:53, Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > The (only) reason I personally care about 32 bit arm is the BBB's
> > > two "PRU" co-processors and low power budget.
> >
> > It's likely too late for BBB already, it was removed from GENERIC in
> > 3416e102c4e9.
> >
> 
> 
> Yea... of course if someone updates its drivers for the evolution of the
> dts "standards" it could come back. Likely only a few days worth of tedious
> archeological digs into the linux kernel to see what changed... but so far
> nobody has stepped up to the relatively simple, but also tedious work.

We've been using BBBs with (IIRC) 13.x images to access USB management bits
(8 FDTI links and one umass device) on Morello development boards.  To
say it's a frustrating experience would be an understatement.  We're in
the process[0] of giving up and switching to Linux.  It's not entirely
clear why things have rotted so badly, but they have.

I suspect consumer embedded boards tend to be deploy-and-forget so
we're just not seeing enough new installs to keep things working.

-- Brooks

[0] It's a project because we're having to swap micro SD cards in BBBs
inside 20+ servers in a data center with restrictive access controls.