[PR] Add new platform: EcoNet EN751221 (DSL / XPON modems)

[Daniel Golle]

Hi Caleb,

first of all thank you for taking care of the EcoNet legacy MIPS
platforms -- they are pretty popular and running up-to-date Linux on
them would be very nice. Supporting xPON or xDSL WAN is still a lot
more work, obviously, but it's good to start from somewhere.

On Wed, Jun 04, 2025 at 02:36:31PM +0200, Caleb James DeLisle wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> 
> This is my second submission of a PR to add support for EcoNet. Per
> community feedback,
> 
> I submitted the bulk of the platform code upstream where it has been
> reviewed and accepted.
> 
> https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-mips/list/?series=960479&state=*
> 
> 
> What is submitted here that is not upstream is support for SPI NAND flash.
> This depends on
> 
> a MediaTek BMT framework which is not upstream.

Nothing should prevent you from submitting support for the SPI host
controller or the SPI-NAND chip to upstream Linux.

MediaTek BMTv1/v2 as well as NMBM are legacy bad-block management
systems, nowadays everybody should just be using UBI instead.

If the (binary) bootloader expects a BMT-variant, as the source
should be GPLv2 you can build it from source without expecting BMT
and use UBI instead.

> 
> Any comments and reviews would be most appreciated.
> 
> 
> https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/19021

Looking at the series I noticed that you are patching SPI subsystem in
order to support BMT, and you also add another vendor-specific driver
as well as DT attribute for that.
If you want to use BMT at all in order to not have to replace the
bootloader it would be better to extend the existing support for the
various MediaTek BMT and NMBM variants, see
target/linux/generic/files/drivers/mtd/nand/

Ie. if what ECONET is doing is really different from any of the existing
MediaTek BMT variants, please just implement OPs for struct mtk_bmt_ops
instead of adding a new standalone driver which needs to hook into
SPI NAND subsystem.


Cheers


Daniel