The diskonchip G4 driver does not fit very well in the raw/parallel
NAND framework simply because such chips have an internal controller
translating DoC-specific commands into NAND ones.
Keeping such a driver in the raw NAND framework is a real burden for
NAND maintainers.
Not to mention that some parts of this driver are a bit worrisome:
- writes are done by subpages, even though we're interfacing with an MLC
chip which are known to not support subpage writes very well (it might
be that the FTL handles the complexity for us though)
- some part of the code are simply ignoring return codes of function that
can fail in a few occasions
- there's a hack to support OOB writes when no data is provided. This
operation is not supported by the chip and should have been rejected,
and nandwrite and other userspace tools should have been patched to
deal with such devices
- the driver is apparently broken when ignore_badblocks module param
is not set to 1 and nobody noticed that (don't know since when this
is the case, but it's not a recent change)
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2018-July/082472.html
Add to that the fact that we already have a docg3 driver in
drivers/mtd/devices/docg3.c and, looking at the code (and regs), it
seems docg3 and docg4 have a lot in common (even the author of this
driver seemed to have realized that interfacing with the raw NAND
framework might have been a bad idea
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2012-January/039517.html).
For all these reasons, I'm proposing to remove this driver. If anyone
ever wants to add support for this chip back, I'd suggest extending
the docg3 driver instead of adding a completely new driver.
Signed-off-by: Boris Brezillon <boris.brezillon@bootlin.com>
Cc: Mike Dunn <mikedunn@newsguy.com>
Cc: Robert Jarzmik <robert.jarzmik@free.fr>
Cc: Sergey Larin <cerg2010cerg2010@mail.ru>
Signed-off-by: Miquel Raynal <miquel.raynal@bootlin.com>
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