Re: [PATCH v2] Revert "target/mips: Deprecate nanoMIPS ISA"

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

Hi Vince,

On 4/9/21 3:10 AM, Vince Del Vecchio wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 6, 2021 11:21 AM, Richard Henderson wrote:
> 
>> I think we should retain the deprecation until you actually follow through 
>> with any of the upstreaming.

> In sum, we're investing in open source nanoMIPS tools because it's an 
> important technology for us, and QEMU is one of the key projects we want to 
> have nanoMIPS supported in.

I'm glad MediaTek has interest in MIPS and is willing to contribute
upstream and help in maintenance! QEMU MIPS codebase is huge and I
don't have the time/resources to maintain it alone.

Regarding the nanoMIPS deprecation, don't worry, we are not going to
remove the nanoMIPS TCG and I7200 core because 1/ it is not breaking
anything, 2/ it is in good shape and 3/ most importantly there are
users in the community.

The plan is to drop the nanoMIPS disassembler because it is broken
since more than 2 years and nobody ever cared to fix it after Stefan's
attempt in Nov 2018:
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg576504.html
So it is certainly unused. Unused unmaintained code has a cost and
negative impact to the generic project development.

If you think it is worth having, you should consider moving it to
the capstone project (https://www.capstone-engine.org/ - it also
uses C++ btw), so other projects could disassemble nanoMIPS blobs.

I prepared a series [1] which split the TCG code from the big
translate.c in one file per ISA. It helps maintenance, as we can
have finer granularity in who reviews/maintains what (using
MAINTAINERS sections) easing collective maintenance in a community.
I'll Cc your team for help with reviewing it when I repost it
(give me up to 1 month).

Regards,

Phil.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2020-11/msg05879.html