Question about qca8k dsa driver and path to follow

[Ansuel Smith]

I am writing this to ask for some help/direction on what path we
should follow for
the qca8k driver. I currently have a pr open [1] to migrate ipq806x to
dsa driver
(qca8k) but some other devs reported that the same switch is also used by other
targets. (ath79, bcm53xx)
It was suggested to move the entire patchset for qca8k to generic
patch dir and start
and adding the required patch to make qca8k work on the other target.

Problem is that excluding ipq806x, not every device uses the qca8k
switch and including
that by default seems wrong. It was suggested to compile that as a
module (with optionally
the dsa subsistem as a kmod) so the driver (and dsa) can be installed
only on the required
devices. So the idea is to reintroduce the dsa.mk kernel modules
makefile used some time ago
for the mvebu target.

In short the main concerns are:
1. Is it right to move qca8k patch to generic?
2. Should we move it to a kmod with the dsa subsystem or compile the
driver built-in ?

Also another concern would be:
1. Can we consider moving the ar8227 swconfig driver to kmod?
That would make the transition easier since we will be able to include
both the required
nodes in the dts and make the user decide what to use. (by
removing/installing the required
kmod).

Thanks in advice for any response to this and I hope we finally find a
path to follow since
the pr is currently stuck (well tested for ipq806x but waiting to be
tested and adapted to work
with other target)