ARM Linux Maintainer Drafts Deprecation Timeline For Old Boards/Features

ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann laid out a proposal with deprecation timeline today for beginning to work toward removing many older ARM boards and obsolete features.

Following the big clean-up earlier this year to obsolete/unused ARM boards/machines and other antiquated code, Arnd Bergmann is beginning to figure out the next bits of hardware that can be deprecated and subsequently removed. The removals won't happen at least until after the Linux 6.12 cycle, which is coming up next and expected to be this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

His current thinking is to deprecate toolchain support for ARMv4 (pre-thumb), iWMMXt, BE32 and OABI (-mabi=apcs-gnu). He's also hoping to reduce the number of board files that are carried by the kernel for non-DeviceTree platforms. But he suspects it will be several more years before the Linux kernel can become DT-only with flushing away the pre-DT board support.

Those interested in a more detailed prognosis with Bergmann's thoughts on various old ARM architecture versions and various kernel features eventually slated for removal, see [RFC} arm architecture board/feature deprecation timeline. We'll see where this discussion leads and ultimately what will end up getting deprecated and/or removed in 2025.