Hi all, We agree to remove the Score arch. I have discussed the status with Sunplus, and they plan to replace the arch with ARM. I will make a request to remove Linux kernel, too. Best, Lennox 2018-02-22 23:45 GMT+08:00 Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>: > While building the cross-toolchains, I noticed that overall, we can build almost > all linux target architectures with upstream binutils and gcc these days, > however there are still some exceptions, and I'd like to find out if anyone > has objections to removing the ones that do not have upstream support. > This are the four architectures I found: > > * score (s+core, sunplus core) was a proprietary RISC architecture > made by sunplus. It is unclear if they still ship any products based on > this architecture, all they list is either ARM Cortex-A9 or an unspecified > RISC core that could be any of arm, mips, nds32, arc, xtensa or > something completely different. The two maintainers have both left the > company many years ago and have not contributed any patches in > at least five years. There was an upstream gcc port, which was marked > 'obsolete' in 2013 and got removed in gcc-5.0. > I conclude that this is dead in Linux and can be removed > > * unicore32 was a research project at Peking University with a SoC > based on the Intel PXA design. No gcc source code has ever been > published, the only toolchain available is a set of binaries that include > a gcc-4.4 compiler. The project page at > http://mprc.pku.edu.cn/~guanxuetao/linux/ has a TODO list that has > not been modified since 2011. The maintainer still Acks patches > and has last sent a pull request in 2014 and last sent a patch of > his own in 2012 when the project appears to have stalled. > I would suggest removing this one. > > * Hexagon is Qualcomm's DSP architecture. It is being actively used > in all Snapdragon ARM SoCs, but the kernel code appears to be > the result of a failed research project to make a standalone Hexagon > SoC without an ARM core. There is some information about the > project at https://wiki.codeaurora.org/xwiki/bin/Hexagon/ and > https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/246243/what-is-was-the-qualcomm-hexagon-comet-board > There is a port to gcc-4.5 on the project page, which is evidently > abandoned, but there is an active upstream LLVM port that is > apparently used to build non-Linux programs. > I would consider this one a candidate for removal as well, given that > there were never any machines outside of Qualcomm that used this, > and they are no longer interested themselves. > > * Meta was ImgTec's own architecture and they upstreamed the kernel > port just before they acquired MIPS. Apparently Meta was abandoned > shortly afterwards and disappeared from imgtec's website in 2014. > The maintainer is still fixing bugs in the port, but I could not find > any toolchain more recent than > https://github.com/img-meta/metag-buildroot/tree/metag-core/toolchain/gcc/4.2.4 > Not sure about this one, I'd be interested in more background > from James Hogan, who probably has an opinion and might have > newer toolchain sources. > > * OpenRISC is a RISC architecture with a free license and an > active community. It seems to have lost a bit of steam after RISC-V > is rapidly taking over that niche, but there are chips out there and > the design isn't going away. Listing it here for completeness only > because there is no upstream gcc port yet, but this will hopefully > change in the future based on > https://lists.librecores.org/pipermail/openrisc/2018-January/000958.html > and I had no problems locating the gcc-7.x tree for building my > toolchains. The port is actively being maintained. > > There are also a couple of architectures that are more or less > unmaintained but do have working gcc support: FR-V and M32R > have been orphaned for a while and are not getting updated > MN10300 is still maintained officially by David Howells but doesn't > seem any more active than the other two, the last real updates were > in 2013. > > Arnd
