NAK: [PATCH 00/27] Add new PowerPC flavor for Freescale e500mc based platforms

[Ben Collins]

On Jun 13, 2012, at 12:55 PM, Tim Gardner wrote:

> I am declining this pull request for the following:
> 
> *) The distro team is strongly encouraged by the engineering director to
> focus on our core offerings, e.g., the bits in main that make up our
> installation media. To my knowledge this kernel version is not targeted
> to be part of an officially supported installation. I have endeavored to
> drop superfluous flavours for each of the past several development cycles.

Our company is in talks to become a full partner with Canonical, so I suspect this makes it more of an official offering than anything else. Also, I am being paid to do community work on this kernel and maintain it fully.

> *) A number of these patches touch architecture independent code and, as
> such, require a more thorough upstream review. Per policy these patches
> should be received via stable updates, or be incorporated in a
> subsequent kernel release.

These have been through such processes. Is there a way to apply patches on a per architecture basis?

> I am personally leery of carrying yet another flavour because I don't
> have a good feel for the size of the community. Is the e500mc widely and
> cheaply available to developers ? We are also resource constrained on
> powerpc buildd and porter performance.
> 
> I suggest that you upload this kernel to universe for the time being.
> There are branch templates that you can use such as the ti-omap4 flavour
> (git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-quantal.git ti-omap4), or the
> lowlatency kernel
> (git://kernel.ubuntu.com/themuso/ubuntu-precise-lowlatency.git).
> Maintenance should be no more complicated then rebasing against the
> master repository. There are scripts in the Lucid and Precise LTS
> backport branches that you could adapt to fully automate the process

Yeah, that pretty much destroys the possibility of a) getting install media and b) ever getting any sort of community support. Also, this line of processors has a large community base. Most PowerPC developers have similar machines (benh).


> If Freescale and the community demonstrate sufficient commitment over
> the next few releases, then perhaps we can consider incorporating this
> flavour into the main kernel repository before 14.04 is released.

Freescale has demonstrated a huge effort community wise already for several years. They have a dozen or so developers maintaining the PowerPC support for their products and have, over years, done a huge amount of work in the upstream kernel and toolchain. Their entire development kit and BSP for these boards is based on Ubuntu/Debian. I don't see what another 1.5 years will prove.

> rtg
> -- 
> Tim Gardner tim.gardner at canonical.com

--
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