On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 02:50:01PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 2:02 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz > <glaubitz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Adam, > > > > On 6/25/19 1:21 PM, Adam Borowski wrote: > > >> We're still using sh4 in Debian > > > > > > I wouldn't call it "used": it has popcon of 1, and despite watching many > > > Debian channels, I don't recall hearing a word about sh4 in quite a while. > > > > So, according to your logic, Debian should drop the mips64el (popcon 1) > > and riscv64 ports (popcon 2) [1]? > > > > > Hardware development is dead: we were promised modern silicon by j-core > > > after original patents expired, but after J2 nothing happened, there was > > > silence from their side, and now https://j-core.org is down. > > > > It's not dead. You can still run it on an FPGA, the code is freely available. > > Plus, the architecture seems to be still in use in the industry [2]. > > It would be nice if one of the maintainers or the remaining users could go > through the code though and figure out which bits are definitely dead > (e.g. sh5), I'm in favor of removing sh5 (64-bit). It's already been removed from GCC and as I understand there was never any hardware really available. There's also a lot of NUMA-type infrastructure in arch/sh that looks like YAGNI violations -- no clear indication that there is or ever was any hardware it made sense on. That could probably be removed too. > don't build, or are incomplete and not worked on for a long > time, compared to the bits that are known to work and that someone > is still using or at least playing with. > I guess a lot of the SoCs that have no board support other than > the Hitachi/Renesas reference platform can go away too, as any products > based on those boards have long stopped updating their kernels. My intent here was always, after getting device tree theoretically working for some reasonable subset of socs/boards, drop the rest and add them back as dts files (possibly plus some small drivers) only if there's demand/complaint about regression. Rich
