Hi everyone, I think there are two questions to ask ourselves here: 1) Do we every foresee anyone wanting to run gem5 with SPARC again? It seems pretty unlikely to me, but maybe there's a use case I'm not thinking of. 2) What is the long-term goal of gem5 and ISA compatibility? It seems to me that at least 90% of gem5 users use x86 or ARM. Do we really want gem5 to support all possible instruction sets? Do we even live up to that today? (no, I know that POWER is broken, for instance.) As a hypothetical, If we limit the scope of gem5 to just x86 and ARM, we may be able to reduce the complexity of some parts of gem5 (e.g., remove unused features from the ISA language).
Jason On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 2:37 AM Andreas Hansson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Steve, > > My main motivation, as we discussed at the ISCA workshop, is to improve > the ratio of working vs non-working gem5 experiences. All the code that is > ‘half working’, MIPS, SPARC etc, brings issues from time to time, and _no_ > benefits from my perspective. In best case it does not confuse new > users...and that’s best case. > > Andreas > > On 07/08/2015 05:33, "gem5-dev on behalf of Steve Reinhardt" > <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote: > > >Seems like we need to look at both the costs and the benefits of dropping > >support. The costs may be low, but we'd have to figure out just how > >low---are there just a few quiet users on sparc, or is it really nobody? > >Second, what are the benefits? It would eliminate some minor hassle, but > >to be honest I haven't run into any cases where maintaining support for > >sparc was difficult. Meanwhile, as soon as we stop doing even the very > >basic regressions we do now, it will likely become irretrievably > >uncompilable. > > > >So in short, I personally wouldn't miss it, but I'd rather not be too > >hasty > >to jettison it just because we think we can get away with it. > > > >Steve > > > >On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 3:24 PM Joel Hestness <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > >> What precisely are we proposing to drop here? > >> > >> Joel > >> > >> > >> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 5:02 PM, Nilay Vaish <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> > On Thu, 6 Aug 2015, Andreas Hansson wrote: > >> > > >> > Any thoughts at all on the topic, or shall we go ahead? > >> >> > >> >> > >> > I am ok with dropping sparc. May be we should ask on the users list > >>as > >> > well. > >> > > >> > > >> > -- > >> > Nilay > >> > > >> > _______________________________________________ > >> > gem5-dev mailing list > >> > [email protected] > >> > http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev > >> > > >> > >> > >> > >> -- > >> Joel Hestness > >> PhD Candidate, Computer Architecture > >> Dept. of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin - Madison > >> http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~hestness/ > >> _______________________________________________ > >> gem5-dev mailing list > >> [email protected] > >> http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev > >> > >_______________________________________________ > >gem5-dev mailing list > >[email protected] > >http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev > > > -- IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are > confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended > recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the > contents to any other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the > information in any medium. Thank you. > > ARM Limited, Registered office 110 Fulbourn Road, Cambridge CB1 9NJ, > Registered in England & Wales, Company No: 2557590 > ARM Holdings plc, Registered office 110 Fulbourn Road, Cambridge CB1 9NJ, > Registered in England & Wales, Company No: 2548782 > _______________________________________________ > gem5-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev > _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list [email protected] http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
