ee6b6b9c38
The mips-malta board is a maintainance burden, has no working UART input
and is unobtainable and thus must be removed.
1. Unobtainable board
=====================
The mips-malta board is not an off-the-shelf part. A quick web
search only show the MIPS website where one is told to "contact sales".
I could find it on ebay, used, at €155 and from single seller.
Not having access to the board means:
a. We cannot maintain it. In fact it could be broken right now.
b. Potential RIOT uses have not access to the board either. In other
words, it is pointless to run on hardware nobody has.
2. No working UART input
========================
Not all applications need UART input, but that is no excuse for not supporting
it:
a. Makes development & debugging way harder.
b. It is impossible to run interactive tests.
b.1. Constrains the rest of the platforms by providing an incentive to not
make tests interactive.
c. The lack of UART is a witness to the poor quality of the port.
I want to stress point (c). If something as basic as a serial port cannot work,
how can we expect more complex fucntionality to work. The answer is impossible
to know, because of point (1).
3. Maintainance burden
======================
The RIOT project has limited time and human resources which can be better spent.
a. Compiling for mips-malta wastes CPU time.
b. Blacklisting the board in the test wastes contributor's time.
c. Adapting the board's makefile during build system rework takes time and makes
the reworks harder.
c.1. Add to that that the changes are most of the time not even tested on the board
because of (1). Look at the github issues/PRs and you will see it.
d. Developers usually stick to the lowest common denominator. Issue (2) sets this
denominator unacceptably low.
MIPS platform in general
========================
In commits I will address general issues in the MIPS platform and why it should all
be removed.
|
||
|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| tests | ||
| main.c | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README.md | ||
gnrc_ipv6_ext test
This test utilizes scapy to test the GNRC's RPL source routing header handling.
To test, compile and flash the application to any board of your liking (since
ethos is used to communicate with non-native boards it really doesn't matter
as long as the application fits).
make flash
And run the tests using
sudo make test
Note that root privileges are required since scapy needs to construct Ethernet
frames to properly communicate over the TAP interface.
The tests succeeds if you see the string SUCCESS.
If any problems are encountered (i.e. if the test prints the sting FAILED),
set the echo parameter in the run() function at the bottom of the test script
(tests/01-run.py) to True. The test script will then offer a more detailed
output.
It might be that due to scapy's sniffer not picking up an expected packet
sometimes that the test application hangs for a while and then issues FAILED.
Just restart the test in that case.