Mark vea9x4 and imx31 deprecated

[Stefan Kalkowski]

Hey Genode hackers,

I'd like to propose to mark the following hardware boards as deprecated,
and to discontinue the support of both platforms in Genode in the medium
term for the following reasons:

* i.MX31 is pretty old, and AFAIK not used by any Genode hackers
* The Versatile Express platform is mainly used to get hands on fresh
ARM CPUs at first, not widely used as a normal development board, and
not used as a platform in practice at all, moreover it's quite
expensive, and thereby not widespread.
* The support of Cortex A9 cpus (cpu used in vea9x4) is already covered
by the Pandaboard and the PBXA9 platform
* A lot of (not widely used) hardware platforms is a burden for the
(currently) relatively small Genode development community.
* Last but not least, both platforms are not tested automatically like
other hardware platforms Genode supports. Normally we try to
automatically test a bunch of basic tests all night on various hardware
platforms. Of course, we could add i.MX31 and vea9x4 to our test farm,
but that includes hardware and engineering costs with (at least for us)
questionable benefit.

So, as long as there is nobody who cries: "No, I use one of these
platforms with Genode! I need it." I would vote for the removal of both.

Regards
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Kalkowski
Genode Labs

http://www.genode-labs.com/ · http://genode.org/