Messages in this thread | | | From | Arnd Bergmann <> | Date | Tue, 23 Jun 2020 09:29:21 +0200 | Subject | Re: [PATCH 0/8] remove unicore32 support |
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On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:57 AM Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org> wrote: > > From: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com> > > The unicore32 port do not seem maintained for a long time now, there is no > upstream toolchain that can create unicore32 binaries and all the links to > prebuilt toolchains for unicore32 are dead. Even compilers that were > available are not supported by the kernel anymore.
Peter Maydell also brought this up recently, since there is also a stale qemu port.
I agree in principle that this port is about as dead as it gets and presumably nobody has attempted running a kernel later than linux-4.9 nor will they do that in the future. I see that the hardware support was never fully completed either, with at least the "PKUnity-v3-UMAL" ethernet driver getting submitted in 2011 but never merged and no public information on a driver for the "PKUnity-v3-MMC" device that presumably holds the rootfs and the "PKUnity-v3-UART" device.
However, it's worth pointing out two arguments against removal:
- Guan Xuetao is still listed as maintainer and asked for the port to be kept around the last time I suggested removing it two years ago. He promised that there would be compiler sources (llvm I think), but has not made those available since.
- https://github.com/gxt has patches to linux-4.9 and qemu-2.7, both released in 2016, with patches dated early 2019. These patches mainly restore a syscall ABI that was never part of mainline Linux but apparently used in production. qemu-2.8 removed support for that ABI and newer kernels (4.19+) as you say can no longer be built with the old toolchain, so I would guess there will not be any future updates to that git tree.
With that information added to the pull request and the maintainer added to Cc:
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
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