Just a small update, ARM TF-A (ATF) support was merged yesterday for all of the supported memory
layouts (2, 4 and 8 GB).
U-boot patches have been sent as well, it's now just a matter of improving the hw-info parser.
Linux DTS has also reached v6 patchset, hopefully it gets merged soon and then the whole stack will be upstream.
Marvell dropped the Armada series entirely. The SoC (A7040), which uses Mochabin, is labeled from Marvell as Not recommended for new products, so no support from Marvell side. Once it is not recommended for new products, it is just a matter of time when it will be announced as obsolete.
Take a look at the previous SoC Armada 3720. You can see that the community behind Espressobin had so many issues (pciadvark driver e.g.; for more curious people, take a look at kernel commits), which were not resolved or were fixed recently.
As far as Marvell is concerned only Octeon TX2 is current, and not recommended only means that its not receiving new features from Marvell, but it will receive bug fixes.
But Octeon TX2 is way more expensive and I have yet to see it in an end product.
Armada 7040 and 8040 are gonna be here for a while, especially with popular products using them.
The only thing that matters from there is the hardware chip availability, and given how these things go it will be years before it's marked as obsolete and more years before supplies of the SoC run out after that.
Opensource developers can't just get NDAs and open support tickets to Marvell anyway so the cut off dates for "official support" are not terribly relevant.
A little reminder about MochaBin.
The crowdfunding is still in progress...
Now 10 days from the end !
@turris members team, so nosense facts about Marvell SoC, that you also use in your products !
Edit: I am not affiliate in anyway with GlobalScaleTrchnologies, Marvell, or any competitors company.
My ideas are only personal and try to stay as neutral as possible, with technical experiences and knowledge sharing in mind...
a) wont work (refund available?)
b) will work with closed source drivers
c) other?
sata booting;
a) should work
b) will work
c) wont work
d) requires manual stuff to work (place where adapter cables can be purchased, cost and product code/description)
these guys seem alot less clear and confident about what they are able to deliver than turris... so I probably wouldn't put those two companies in the same sentence...
(and you have to pay before you can ask questions)
Hey, what nonsense facts? I would like to argue about it more. Could you provide your point of view? What did I say wrong? Feel free to reach Marvell about it. We got it as official information that the Armada series are dropped out, and I provided it as proof that A7040 is not recommended for new products. That was also confirmed by @robimarko in this thread.
Yeah, some manufacturers have it in stock, and they need to sell it. Because they prepared HW schematics, bought components, created a prototype and ran mass production, and didn't want to bear losses.
We are using their products that is indeed true. We are still quite satisfied with Marvell Armada 385, which we use for Turris Omnia routers, but on the other hand, there are still issues with Marvell Armada 3720. Just take a look at the problems that Marvell ESPRESSObin has, and we also have it for Turris MOX. Even we opened several tickets to them, but we ended up that Marvell would not provide any support for it. So we tried to fix issues in the kernel ourselves. It is still not enough. I can speak about missing PCI MSI and Multi-MSI interrupts necessary for using AX Wi-Fi cards. PCI driver aardvark itself is questionable, too, as there was discussion about removing it from the kernel.
Even without missing documentation for A3720, our kernel guys are doing their best as much as they can to improve the state of armada-37xx in kernel in all the things I mentioned even in cpufreq. Sometimes it is hard to get a reply in such cases as this one.
Just take a look, who is trying to have better support for it in the kernel, and you would be surprised.
Of course, we reached other manufacturers, but it is hard to get chips in small quantities and with good specifications. So, yes. We will be using Marvell in our new products as well.
Well, hopefully, you will enjoy MochaBin-5G as you seem to be interested in it. I wish you luck.
Why shouldn't A7040 be used in new designs?
It will be manufactured and sold for years to come, the feature development for it has stopped for Marvell SDK but that means nothing for anybody else.
I would have preferred A8040 at least because of SERDES lanes so there wouldn't have to be more compromises, but its not like anybody asked.
I agree that kernel support from Marvell has been really bad, especially for A3720 which has been really riddled with bugs (I have to support Espressobin Ultras, so I know the pain), and it's mostly been Turris guys trying to fix it.
This is the classic issue when you only care about your SDK and that's it.
A3720 CPUFreq scaling is still ignored by Marvell.
The issue is that other vendors are even worse, there you can't even get this level of docs, have you ever tried working on QCA?
Well, you should ask Marvell about it. I just know that Marvell admitted publicly that A385, A3720, A7040, A8040 ended. They were removed from the Marvell website, so you could not find them even listed there.
And what I could add to 7040 is that Marvell labeled it as "Not recommended for new products".
I doubt it will be manufactured anymore due to chips outages, etc. They just want to get rid of what they have left in the warehouse, and that's it.
I assume they want to move the market to Octeon TX2 instead, but they have a ton of users of all of the SoC-s you listed.
For example, currently, all of the DENT Prestera switches use the A7040 + A385 combo, I kind of doubt this will get updated anytime soon.
I deal with ODM-s regularly and they haven't mentioned that they cant get the SoC-s, they are having issues with pretty much anything else though.
BTW, I am just working on fixing the CN9130-CRB support that's upstream as its completely broken currently.
Then you are dealing with the same issue as me, I even sent out 2 patches upstream to even get the GPIO controller enabled but nobody has bothered to look at it so far.
I have 4-5 more in queue to get the SD slot, switch, SFP etc working.
U-boot support is broken for MMC completelly.
@erdoukki@robimarko I got a Mochbin Dev Board running OpenWRT SNAPSHOT on it now.
I would like to add some packages to the image to run it as the www facing router of hardware DMZ.
Interested in learning how far you can push it to run OpenWRT with additional useful services as a powerful SOHO router?
I would create a new topic to go into details (internet in countryside France is horrible, so building imagebuilder env. gonna take me some while=
