Subject: Re: Is PPC 44x PIKA Warp board still relevant?

From: Michael Ellerman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2022 20:41:53 +1000

Christophe Leroy <[email-masked]> writes:
> Hi Dmitry
>
> Le 25/09/2022 à 07:06, Dmitry Torokhov a écrit :
>> Hi Michael, Nick,
>> 
>> I was wondering if PIKA Warp board still relevant. The reason for my
>> question is that I am interested in dropping legacy gpio APIs,
>> especially OF-specific ones, in favor of newer gpiod APIs, and
>> arch/powerpc/platforms/44x/warp.c is one of few users of it.
>
> As far as I can see, that board is still being sold, see
>
> https://www.voipon.co.uk/pika-warp-asterisk-appliance-p-932.html

On the other hand it looks like PIKA technologies went bankrupt earlier
this year.

>> The code in question is supposed to turn off green led and flash red led
>> in case of overheating, and is doing so by directly accessing GPIOs
>> owned by led-gpio driver without requesting/allocating them. This is not
>> really supported with gpiod API, and is not a good practice in general.
>
> As far as I can see, it was ported to led-gpio by
>
> ba703e1a7a0b powerpc/4xx: Have Warp take advantage of GPIO LEDs 
> default-state = keep
> 805e324b7fbd powerpc: Update Warp to use leds-gpio driver
>
>> Before I spend much time trying to implement a replacement without
>> access to the hardware, I wonder if this board is in use at all, and if
>> it is how important is the feature of flashing red led on critical
>> temperature shutdown?
>
> Don't know who can tell it ?

I would be surprised if anyone is still running upstream kernels on it.

I can't find any sign of any activity on the mailing list related to it
since it was initially merged.

> Maybe let's perform a more standard implementation is see if anybody 
> screams ?

How much work is it to convert it?

Flashing a LED when the machine dies is nice, but not exactly critical,
hopefully the machine *isn't* dying that often :)

cheers