On 13 March 2018 at 17:18, Bastian Koppelmann <kbast...@mail.uni-paderborn.de> wrote: > On 03/09/2018 04:13 PM, Alex Bennée wrote: >> >> Bastian Koppelmann <kbast...@mail.uni-paderborn.de> writes: > > [...] >>> >>> I always saw it as a big plus that QEMU supports nearly any >>> architecture, no matter how obscure it is. So I'm a bit more hesitant on >>> dropping architectures quickly. >> >> All things being equal I agree, however there is a maintenance burden >> for the QEMU upstream, especially if the only active use if on >> out-of-tree branches or behind the closed doors of research groups. >> >> Looking at https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/TileGX it >> doesn't give much of an idea of where I would get toolchains to build >> guest binaries or what guest user-space I could run. > > > I'm not saying, we shouldn't drop them. To me it felt like we brought just > another target to the chop block while we were at it. > > Maybe a good approach is to deprecate the target first, then ask if somebody > else is willing to maintain it, and if this fails, drop it.
Personally, I think it's useful to consider not merely "do we have anybody actively maintaining this" (after all our x86 frontend is not exactly very well-loved!) but also "are there users of QEMU out there using it?" and "is this actually something that exists in the real world as actual silicon in any quantity?". I think unicore32 failed on both of those, but tilegx passes the latter and possibly the former. thanks -- PMM
