MIPS AR7 Platform Support Removed In Linux 6.7

With the MIPS CPU architecture at the end of the road in light of RISC-V and LoongArch, there isn't much going on when it comes to MIPS development for the Linux kernel. Most cycles these days just brings bug fixes and removing old/unmaintained platforms. The latest MIPS platform now being removed is AR7 with Linux 6.7.

The AR7 for what started out as a Texas Instruments MIPS32 processor designed for routers is now being removed from the mainline Linux kernel. The TI AR7 is what was part of the IP that Texas Instruments sold off to Infineon a decade and a half ago and then spun off into the Lantiq company. The AR7 MIPS32 processor was found in various DSL modems long ago from Linksys, D-Link, and many other companies.

But these devices have now been long past their end-of-life and would be extremely rare to find anyone still running them in production while also using a mainline upstream Linux kernel build. Thus with Linux 6.7 the TI AR7 platform support is being removed as it's unmaintained.

The MIPS pull for Linux 6.7 in turn lightens the kernel by around four thousand lines of code. The rest of the MIPS material this kernel cycle is just the usual minor clean-ups and bug fixes.