Hi all, I am in favour of revisiting this on a regular basis. Our previous discussion started with SPARC being the #1 candidate for removal (due to level of functionality and lack of testing as well as maintainers), but eventually we landed on ALPHA being a more likely candidate (due to absence of an up-to-date tool chain and modern kernels etc).
What I would propose to make some progress is to update http://gem5.org/Supported_Architectures with a simple table, for each ISA: Maintainers (none, or a list of names) Level of functionality/ISA support (low, med, high) OS support (Linux, BSD, etc) Test coverage (low, med, high) Tool chain availability (yes, no) Kernel availability (yes, no) Others? Are these the right ones? Then for each ISA it is fairly obvious which ones are candidates for removal, based on our priorities. Brandon, would you be happy to take a first stab at such a table? Andreas On 27/02/2017, 18:01, "gem5-dev on behalf of Potter, Brandon" <gem5-dev-boun...@gem5.org on behalf of brandon.pot...@amd.com> wrote: >Hi Jason, > >Thanks for the links; I was not aware that they existed. > >I am not going to try to press the issue if others want to keep the ISAs. >I was not sure what the consensus was on keeping them, but it seems that >some folks want them to stick around. > >Regards, >Brandon > >-----Original Message----- >From: gem5-dev [mailto:gem5-dev-boun...@gem5.org] On Behalf Of Jason >Lowe-Power >Sent: Monday, February 27, 2017 10:24 AM >To: gem5 Developer List <gem5-dev@gem5.org> >Subject: Re: [gem5-dev] ISA Deprecation > >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 >_______________________________________________ >gem5-dev mailing list >gem5-dev@gem5.org >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. _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list gem5-dev@gem5.org http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
