On 18/04/2024 05.27, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
Tomorrow I plan to push patches to mark the nios2 target as obsolete in GCC 14.
Background: Intel has EOL'ed the Nios II processor IP and is now directing
their FPGA customers to a RISC-V platform instead.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/781327/intel-is-discontinuing-ip-ordering-codes-listed-in-pdn2312-for-nios-ii-ip.html
The Nios II hardware on loan from Intel that we were using for testing at
Mentor Graphics/Siemens was returned around the first of the year. For some
time we had been using QEMU to test the nios2-elf target, but we never had a
QEMU test harness set up that would boot the Linux kernel, and user-mode
QEMU on this target is too buggy/unmaintained to use for primary testing.
So the current situation is that none of the listed maintainers for any of
the GNU toolchain components have access to a fully working test
configuration any more, we have all moved on to new jobs and different
projects, Intel has also moved on to a different platform, and our former
contacts on Intel's Nios II team have moved on as well. It seems like it's
time to pull the plug.
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.
Thanks for the heads-up, Sandra! FWIW: QEMU already marked the nios2 target
as deprecated, too, and plans to remove it in version 9.1 (in autumn this year).
Thomas
