Re: [PATCH] nios2: remove the architecture

On Tue, May 19, 2026, at 12:30, Simon Schuster wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 05:13:58PM -0700, Ethan Nelson-Moore wrote:
>
> 2035 is still a rather tight timeframe for our typical support/phase-out
> period (we would hope to get close to 2040 with the SLTS extensions),
> which is also the reason for our targeted 'lifetime extension' for the
> nios2 architecture for approximately 5 years, or more precisely ~2-3
> SLTS kernels assuming the usual cadence of 2 years between SLTS versions
> (+ some safety margin).

I think that is a reasonable target. We have a bunch of embedded
architectures that have a similarly small user base and I expect
that we will want to remove most of them at some point, as we did
for seven architectures in linux-4.17.

As long as there is a maintainer for nios2 and it's not actively
getting in the way of a specific treewide change, I don't see any
reason to remove this any earlier than the other ones.

Obviously at some point nios2 will have to get removed because
of the limit to gcc-14 or older, but that should not be a problem
for the next few LTS releases.

> Sure, I'd be glad to do so, but so far I refrained from it as I was a bit
> unsure about the netiquette (can I simply do so by self-proclamation? At
> least the git history seems to suggest so...).

Dinh already replied that he welcomes the help, and I also suggested
the same thing a year ago. As the only known user that has contributed
patches in a long time, you are obviously qualified.

Sending a patch for the MAINTAINERS file to Dinh is the first step,
once he has sent that upstream, you can (optionally) apply for
kernel.org account that would let you host a git tree on kernel.org
or have a tree that you both have access to.

     Arnd