Is the board platform restriction still applicable?

[zapta]

@Obijuan, @cavearr, there are two boards in boards.json that have platform restriction. The platform linux_armv7l doesn't seem to be supported anymore (see #460 (comment)). Can these two boards be removed from boards.json()?

apio/apio/resources/boards.json

Line 105 in d2c5bb3

"platform": "linux_armv7l"

  "icoboard": {
    "name": "icoBOARD 1.0",
    "fpga": "iCE40-HX8K-CT256",
    "programmer": {
      "type": "icoprog"
    },
    "platform": "linux_armv7l"     <<-----
  },
  "Cat-board": {
    "name": "CAT Board",
    "fpga": "iCE40-HX8K-CT256",
    "programmer": {
      "type": "litterbox"
    },
    "platform": "linux_armv7l"     <<-----
  },

[cavearr]

@zapta, I think if icoprog or litterbox existed in linux_aarch64 we should update it.

I will look for these tools, I don't know these boards, but I will try to locate them and see if we can compile them or they exist in the arm64 version for Linux.

In any case, since oss-cad-suite does not support this architecture, if programmers did not exist we would have to eliminate them, because they will really be obsolete boards.

[Obijuan]

Please, do not remove these two boards.
These boards were designed to be used from a raspberry-pi. The icoboard is a clasic platform in the world of the open source FPGAs. It was one of the very first boards. They are a kind of legacy boards (i have one icoboard)
Maybe currently they cannot be used directly with Apio but it can be fixed in the future. It is a low priority task anyway.

For the moment leaves these two boards as legacy, but do not them please

[zapta]

Hi @Obijuan, sounds good, I understand the need to preserve them.

Since the new apio release, allows using custom boards.json and programmers.json files in the project dir, how about adding to apio-examples repo an example for those boards that demonstrates it?. And if the user will find one day a programmer binary that works, they can place it on the path and run apio upload seamlessly.

This approach has a benefit:

• The users will get a better starting point and documentation of the challenges using these boards.
• The official boards.json will not contain boards that are known to be non functional.
• It demonstrates a path for graceful deprecation of boards.

Any thoughts?

[zapta]

I moved this to a new issue here #470

Closing this one.