Re: [PATCH v2 18/19] ARM: mark axxia platform as deprecated

On Thu, Jul 2, 2026, at 00:41, Ethan Nelson-Moore wrote:
> Hi, Arnd,
>
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 2:26 PM Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]> wrote:
>> From: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
>
> All of these patches have this line at the beginning but were sent
> from your kernel.org email - did something go wrong with git
> send-email?

I should fix this, but it's been like this for a while after
I had patch emails get rejected too much for coming from my
arndb.de domain.

>>  config ARCH_AXXIA
>> -       bool "LSI Axxia platforms"
>> +       bool "LSI Axxia platforms (DEPRECATED)"
>>         depends on ARCH_MULTI_V7 && ARM_LPAE
>
> The dependency on LPAE reminded me of two other 32-bit ARM platforms
> with lots of memory: Calxeda Midway and Highbank. Is anyone still
> using those? Maybe they could be removed, since people seem to want to
> remove highmem:
> https://lwn.net/Articles/813201/
> https://static.linaro.org/connect/lvc20/presentations/LVC20-106-0.pdf

Andre Przywara used to use those for testing, I don't think anyone
else has powered them on for a while, see

https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email protected]/

If it gets in the way, or Andre gets tired of maintaining it,
we can remove it, until then I would keep it. Axxia is different
because it's neither maintained nor functional.

There are a few more platforms that need highmem for the time
being:

 - TI keystone2 has users and is well maintained, so this will
   stay as long as we can justify holding up highmem removal
   for it. This one has a unique way of dealing with coherent
   DMA that requires LPAE and possibly highmem.

 - Renesas R-Car M1 need lpae support for (IIRC) >1GB
   configurations, and I have a prototype patch
   to make that one work with a modified virt_to_phys()
   implementation.

 - Amazon/Annapurna Alpine is similar to Axxia in the 
   current state of upstream support, but has someone
   working on an OpenWRT port using the downstream
   patches. The OpenWRT supported devices all have 2GB
   or less.

A few others need highmem for large memory configs
with more than 2GB of RAM but would stay working for
the common configurations with 2GB or less, using
CONFIG_VMSPLIT_2G_OPT.

     Arnd