[OpenWrt-Devel] ath79 (qca95xx): Status of SPI-Attached NAND Drivers?

[Jeff Kletsky]

Context
=======

Working on bringing up the GL.iNet AR750S as a NAND variant
on the ath79 target. While I can build an image, it fails to attach
a driver to the SPI-attached NAND. There is a GL.iNet AR300M NAND
variant, but I am unable to confirm if this device will fully boot
from the images generated (as my AR300M is NOR only).


Questions
=========

* What is the level of support for QCA9531 and QCA9563 SoCs for NAND?

* Is the AR300M NAND target bootable?

   * If not, should it be removed from the list of valid targets
     until NAND support is available and confirmed bootable?


Thanks,

Jeff



What I Have Found So Far
========================

* This List, May 17, 2018
   "[OpenWrt-Devel] [PATCH] ath79: add spi nand driver, the source code from"
   "[OpenWrt-Devel] [PATCH] mtd: add spi nand driver"


Last message on thread that I found, from Florian Fainelli:

On 05/17/2018 06:14 PM, Luochongjun wrote:
> ---
>  .../patches-4.9/491-mtd-spi-nand-driver.patch      | 2785 ++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 2785 insertions(+)
>  create mode 100644 target/linux/ar71xx/patches-4.9/491-mtd-spi-nand-driver.patch

Instead of combining all upstream patches that got recently submitted on
the MTD mailing-list into one large patch, you should provide a patch
that includes all the necessary patches to bring the recent SPI-NAND
framework into the OpenWrt kernel tree. This makes it much easier to
drop dependencies and/or backport fixes as we move from either 4.9 to
another 4.9 stable release, or from 4.9 to say 4.14 for instance.

See how bcm53xx does it for instance.

Thank you!



* https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/1428

Closed by mkresin on November 26, 2018 with the comment

>> But it requires 4.19 to not have to backport pretty much the whole
>> MTD and SPI subsystems

> Please re-spin the patch as soon as we have kernel 4.19 support. The
> approach was already NAK'ed upstream and I don't see much gain in
> adding the hack if the next major kernel in OpenWrt will provide a
> suitable solution.



* git://git.infradead.org/linux-mtd

Earliest "interesting" tag is "mtd/for-4.16" (not 4.14)




* Linux Kernel commit eaa76499711535fd64d747cc4ef0d78ab0fd41c

     Merge tag 'mtd/for-4.21' of git://git.infradead.org/linux-mtd

       SPI-NAND drivers changes:
        - Remove the depreacated mt29f_spinand driver from staging.


(At least that's a while off, but reinforces the unwillingness of
upstream acceptance of keeping the mt29f_spinand driver alive.)



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