The Tile architecture port was added by Chris Metcalf in 2010, and
maintained until early 2018 when he orphaned it due to his departure
from Mellanox, and nobody else stepped up to maintain it. The product
line is still around in the form of the BlueField SoC, but no longer
uses the Tile architecture.
There are also still products for sale with Tile-GX SoCs, notably the
Mikrotik CCR router family. The products all use old (linux-3.3) kernels
with lots of patches and won't be upgraded by their manufacturers. There
have been efforts to port both OpenWRT and Debian to these, but both
projects have stalled and are very unlikely to be continued in the future.
Given that we are reasonably sure that nobody is still using the port
with an upstream kernel any more, it seems better to remove it now while
the port is in a good shape than to let it bitrot for a few years first.
Cc: Chris Metcalf <chris.d.metcalf@gmail.com>
Cc: John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>
Link: http://www.mellanox.com/page/npu_multicore_overview
Link: https://jenkins.debian.net/view/rebootstrap/job/rebootstrap_tilegx_gcc7/
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
bb9d812643