Re: Deprecation of the LM32 target

[Peter Maydell]

On Tue, 29 Dec 2020 at 10:38, Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 26/12/2020 10.06, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > I mean, the whole point of an emulator is being able to run existing code 
> > on modern hardware,
> > usually because the old hardware is no longer available. And as long as the 
> > target is
> > functional, I don't see a point in taking away the functionality.
>
> You also have to consider that it takes some effort to keep code up to date,
> e.g. if there is a bigger restructuring of the code base going on, you also
> have to work on neglected targets, too. If there is no active maintainer
> left anymore, it's quite a burden for all the other developers.
> So if there is no known user left (are *you* using lm32?), and there is no
> active maintainer anymore, it's IMHO adequate to mark a target as
> deprecated.

Right, the issue is not that the hardware being emulated is old,
it's that the code in QEMU to do that emulation is old and there's
no active maintainer for it and nobody helping to keep it up to
date with the rest of QEMU and its evolving APIs and practices.
"And we don't think there are likely to be any serious users either"
is just the cherry on the cake...

> If someone still wants to run old lm32 code, they still can use
> older versions of QEMU to do this.

Or they could put in the work to be the maintainer :-)

thanks
-- PMM