Re: [Qemu-devel] Proposal: deprecate and remove QEMU's unicore32 target code

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 11:51:13AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> I propose that we deprecate and plan to remove the unicore32 code:
> 
>  * It has had no changes since 2012 that were not tree-wide
>    maintenance/API changes/other global updates
>  * We dropped the linux-user unicore32 support in 2016 because of
>    a clash between the 'old ABI' that it was implementing and the
>    ABI that's actually in the upstream Linux kernel, and there have
>    been no moves to get this fixed so we could re-enable it, nor
>    any complaints when it went away
>  * Linux is now planning to drop unicore support
>    (https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org/msg1619640.html)
>  * there is apparently no upstream gcc support for the architecture
>  * nobody has ever reported a bug or problem to us about it
> 
> Essentially, it seems to be a largely-inactive university R&D project,
> it's costing us in maintenance effort every time we have to touch it,
> and I don't think it has any real users.
> 
> Does anybody disagree?
> 
> If we go ahead with deprecating then we should:
>  * add a note to Changelog that we're deprecating the target
>  * ditto qemu-doc.texi's deprecation section
>  * patch hw/unicore32/puv3.c to warn on startup that it's deprecated
>  * remove it entirely for the 2.14 release

Sounds like a good plan to me.

> We could also remove linux-user/unicore32 immediately, since
> the linux-user target has been disabled for some time.

Agreed.

Regards,
Daniel
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