Re: [Qemu-devel] Deprecate tilegx ?

[Peter Maydell]

On 13 March 2018 at 17:18, Bastian Koppelmann
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 03/09/2018 04:13 PM, Alex Bennée wrote:
>>
>> Bastian Koppelmann <address@hidden> writes:
>
> [...]
>>>
>>> I always saw it as a big plus that QEMU supports nearly any
>>> architecture, no matter how obscure it is. So I'm a bit more hesitant on
>>> dropping architectures quickly.
>>
>> All things being equal I agree, however there is a maintenance burden
>> for the QEMU upstream, especially if the only active use if on
>> out-of-tree branches or behind the closed doors of research groups.
>>
>> Looking at https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/TileGX it
>> doesn't give much of an idea of where I would get toolchains to build
>> guest binaries or what guest user-space I could run.
>
>
> I'm not saying, we shouldn't drop them. To me it felt like we brought just
> another target to the chop block while we were at it.
>
> Maybe a good approach is to deprecate the target first, then ask if somebody
> else is willing to maintain it, and if this fails, drop it.

Personally, I think it's useful to consider not merely "do we
have anybody actively maintaining this" (after all our x86 frontend
is not exactly very well-loved!) but also "are there users of QEMU
out there using it?" and "is this actually something that exists
in the real world as actual silicon in any quantity?". I think
unicore32 failed on both of those, but tilegx passes the latter
and possibly the former.

thanks
-- PMM