Hi Brandon, See this discussion for some of the history here: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.m5.devel/30510
Let me try to summarize for everyone. There are a number of reasons to deprecate/phase out most of the supported ISAs. Briefly: - Less work for contributors especially when updating SE mode - Less testing time - Some ISAs have no maintainer - Some ISAs have (basically) no tests, or the tests are proprietary - Causes confusion for users (e.g., they run experiments with an incomplete ISA, or worse) However, some people *do* use the code for ISAs other than x86, ARM, RISC-V, and HSAIL. For instance: - From Jakub "[gem5 is] the only existing and basically working open source sun4v simulator. - Boris uses gem5's support for MIPS and POWER to do retargetable compiler research, and "dropping them would be pretty much equivalent to discontinuing GEM5 altogether" I think Steve makes one of the best arguments both for and against this in this message: http://www.mail-archive.com/gem5-dev@gem5.org/msg19429.html. -- My opinions below: From our discussion at HPCA, I think it comes down to "what does the community want gem5 to be?" Right now, gem5 has a wide variety of different use cases. I think we need to decide as a community what use cases we want to support and focus our limited developer time on those use cases. For instance, do we think it is worth it to support MIPS emulation? Maybe someone can come up with a list of "gem5 use cases" for us to look at and discuss. I don't have time in the next week or so, but after that I'll put it on my to do list. At a higher level, I strongly believe we need to take a step back and make sure that gem5 is serving its users as best as it can. There's a lot of unmaintained code in gem5 that is hurting and not helping. For instance, it would be great if Brandon could focus his time purely on improving x86 SE mode, which many people use, and not fixing bugs with SPARC. Cheers, Jason On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 4:47 PM Potter, Brandon <brandon.pot...@amd.com> wrote: Hello all, A colleague mentioned that ISA deprecation was discussed during the recent gem5 meeting. I am wondering what the community's feelings are toward the idea and which ISAs would be on the chopping block. Personally, I'd like to kill ALPHA, MIPS, POWER, and SPARC. This means that we'd retain X86, ARM, RISCV, and HSAIL-X86. I can help out with the removal if we decide that we want to kill some of them. We might wait until March 1st to start the process since we're supposed to transition to fully transition to Git on that day; we could create a tag for the ISA deprecation in case someone wants to revive one of them in the future (i.e. MIPS or POWER if someone wants to maintain them). Regards, Brandon _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list gem5-dev@gem5.org http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list gem5-dev@gem5.org http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
