De-orbit Allwinner A10/A20/A31 for 12.0

[Kyle Evans]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 3:51 PM, Rogiel Sulzbach <rogiel at rogiel.com> wrote:
> On Jun 12, 2018, 5:33 PM -0300, Emmanuel Vadot <manu at bidouilliste.com>, wrote:
>>
>> Hello arm@
>>
>> I don't like to send this email but ...
>>
>> I want to remove A10/A20/A31 support for FreeBSD 12, here is the
>> reason why :
>>
>> - I don't have time to maintain thoses SoC
>> - For A10/A20 we currently don't boot on it since it requires new
>> clocks binding (handled by aw_ccung) and I have no time to do the
>> switch.
>> - H3 (which is 32bits too) is way better in term of performance and
>> price, you can buy a "good" $10 board while getting an A20 will cost
>> you more for some reason.
>> - My A31 board (BananapiM1) just died today after a long time of being
>> my arm32 reference board.
>> - I don't want the code to stay like the old 32 bits rockchip or
>> amlogic code that can't even boot nowadays.
>>
>> If someone want to step up and convert A10/A20 to ccung I'll be
>> glad to help/review but if no one step up it's unreasonable for me to
>> support those right now and I prefer to remove completely the support.
>>
>> The plan is to remove support in one month (July 12th) if there is no
>> volunteer to update the current code.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> --
>> Emmanuel Vadot <manu at bidouilliste.com> <manu at freebsd.org>
>
> Hello Emmanuel,
>
> we have recently considered to switching from i.MX6 to a A20 for cost reasons.
>
> I have just bought a Banana Pi with an A20 to test performance and compare it to the Wandboard. The problem with H3 (and all other better socs) is the lack of a proper SATA controller. A real controller is only available in A10/A20 SoCs, all others go through a horrible SATA-to-USB adapter that is horribly slow.
>
> Anyway, in case we decide to switch, I can keep the A20 running -CURRENT. I might need some help getting started since I do not have a lot of experience in the kernel, other than the AHCI driver for the imx.

Hi Rogiel,

FWIW- I'm going to go ahead and write the ccung bits for A10/A20 so
that I can make use of my Lamobo R1 when the switch driver for that is
finished.

This is probably not a bad time to pare down the DTS+U-Boot we build
for these SoC to what people are actually willing to claim they use
with FreeBSD, though.

Thanks,

Kyle Evans