Re: [Qemu-devel] Proposal: deprecate and remove QEMU's unicore32 target code

[Xuetao Guan]

> I propose that we deprecate and plan to remove the unicore32 code:
>
>  * It has had no changes since 2012 that were not tree-wide
>    maintenance/API changes/other global updates
>  * We dropped the linux-user unicore32 support in 2016 because of
>    a clash between the 'old ABI' that it was implementing and the
>    ABI that's actually in the upstream Linux kernel, and there have
>    been no moves to get this fixed so we could re-enable it, nor
>    any complaints when it went away
>  * Linux is now planning to drop unicore support
>    (https://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg1619640.html)
>  * there is apparently no upstream gcc support for the architecture
>  * nobody has ever reported a bug or problem to us about it
>
> Essentially, it seems to be a largely-inactive university R&D project,
> it's costing us in maintenance effort every time we have to touch it,
> and I don't think it has any real users.
>
> Does anybody disagree?
>
> If we go ahead with deprecating then we should:
>  * add a note to Changelog that we're deprecating the target
>  * ditto qemu-doc.texi's deprecation section
>  * patch hw/unicore32/puv3.c to warn on startup that it's deprecated
>  * remove it entirely for the 2.14 release
>
> We could also remove linux-user/unicore32 immediately, since
> the linux-user target has been disabled for some time.
>
> Possibly there are other target architectures we could reasonably
> deprecate-and-remove (though none of the other ones Linux is dropping
> in this round are ones we support)...
>
> thanks
> -- PMM
>

Hi, Peter
I am really sorry to reply so late, since I seldom use this email account
in recent years. I will add my new email account to related bits.

I had sent email to clarify the status of UniCore to Arnd and lkml. In a
word, UniCore is a real product and we still use the port internally. So,
I really appreciate having unicore32 port in the tree.

Thanks,
Guan Xuetao