> On 06 Jun 2016, at 19:05 , Beckmann, Brad <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi,
> As others have already pointed out, there is still significant industry > support for MIPS, SPARC, and POWER. Perhaps an argument could be made > against ALPHA, but how hard is that ISA to maintain? Also there is some > historical significance to ALPHA, since it was the first ISA. As Boris just > pointed out, if anything, we should actively be encouraging someone to add > RISC-V. We only drive people away from the simulator when we discuss > removing features. I looked at MIPS (FS) support a few months back; it’s just not there; I mean literally, what is there is not even a start to get it to working in any reasonable timeframe. I’d love to see 64bit MIPS support but that’s quite a lot of man hours. One thing people need to remember however is that retiring (currently) unusable code does not mean that the code disappears, it sits in attic and could be brought back; the effort to get it working is needed now and will be then. The question simply is how likely is it going to happen and when does the cost of keeping it around by far exceed the cost of resurrecting it. My experience with x86_64 on non-Linux was not entirely happy the last 9 months, that I’d rather wish the “advertising” would have been correct or I might have never gone down that path; you need to be realistic in terms of what people can expect and I’d rather have 3 properly working ISAs than 7 out of which I waste a year of time to get anywhere. In that way I think Andreas is right: you need at least 3 people per ISA that feel responsible and commit themselves to (a) review patches and get them in, (b) keep enough Open Source bits available for tests and reproducibility, and (c) fee actively responsible for further development, documentation, keeping things going. Just my 3cts Bjoern _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list [email protected] http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
