Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Deprecation / Removal of old hardware support

[Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>]

Found some moxa.com mail addresses in the kernel log,
so including them. You can speak about the status of the
MOXA ART deployments if you like, I am talking about


On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 12:52 PM Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 10:37:36AM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:
>
> > Sometimes I get the feeling that people focused on desktops
> > or servers suffer from velocitate (speed blindness) and think
> > everybody is like them. (Well don't we all.)
>
> Conversely, the approaches that keep stable kernels going also get
> applied to designing hardware that people intend to be stable - if
> it works well enough now why try something new, especially where that
> new stuff is most likely going to be more expensive to either buy or
> work with?

Exactly. I think this is what happened at MOXA with the ART SoC.

It seems that MOXA made that with a bunch of consultants from
Faraday in Taiwan supplying their IP blocks and know-how. Since
then they have had zero incentive to upgrade the SoC to a newer
version, as this SoC handles the ethernet, GPIO and serial lines
they need just fine.

They recently made a new design using Freescale (now NXP)
LS1021a dualcore A7, but I can see that the ART (ARMv4) in
EM-1240 and their EP93xx products (ARMv4T) are still in active
deployment and even recommended for new projects, samples can
be easily obtained.[1]

And this is good stuff, it's rock solid at this point. I just wish and
hope that they really invest in using the very latest kernels
also for these elder boards even though I rarely hear from them
on the mailing lists.

At companies that have their internal ASIC design teams I
sometimes get the feeling that these are churning out newer
and more powerful ASICs as a therapeutic exercise just to
keep their skills up. But I hope it is pure prejudice on my
part.

Yours,
Linus Walleij

[1] https://www.moxa.com/product/compact_fanless_computers.htm