Re: Deprecation/removal of nios2 target support

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2024, at 17:44, Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Apr 2024, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
>
>> Therefore I'd like to mark Nios II as obsolete in GCC 14 now, and remove
>> support from all toolchain components after the release is made.  I'm not 
>> sure
>> there is an established process for obsoleting/removing support in other
>> components; besides binutils, GDB, and GLIBC, there's QEMU, newlib/libgloss,
>> and the Linux kernel.  But, we need to get the ball rolling somewhere.
>
> CC:ing Arnd Bergmann regarding the obsolescence in the Linux kernel.

We have not yet marked nios2 as deprecated in the kernel, but that
is mostly because the implementation does not get in the way too
much and Dinh Nguyen is still around as a maintainer and merging
bugfixes.

Almost all nios2 kernel changes I see in the past decade have been
done blindly without testing on hardware, either for treewide
changes, or by code inspection. The only notable exceptions I could
find are from Andreas Oetken and Bernd Weiberg at Siemens and
from Marek Vasut (all added to Cc in case they have something to add).

We should probably remove nios2 from the kernel in the near future,
but even if we decide not to, I think deprecating it from gcc is the
right idea: If there are a few remaining users that still plan
to update their kernels, gcc-14 will still be able to build new
kernels for several years.

     Arnd