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Re: Deprecating ARM FPA support (was: ARM Neon Tests Failing on non-Neon Target)
On 5/24/10, Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@arm.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2010年05月23日 at 23:15 +0200, Steven Bosscher wrote:
>> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Martin Guy wrote:
>> >
>> >> Dropping FPA support from GCC effectively makes the OABI unusable, and
>> >> often we are forced to use that by the environment supplied to us. Are
>> >> there significant advantages to removing FPA support, other than
>> >> reducing the size of the ARM backend?
>> >
>> > I think that maintainability of the ARM backend is indeed the major
>> > benefit to dropping it.
>>
>> There are lots of other ports that could be dropped to improve
>> maintainability of some backends, or even the whole of GCC. That has
>> never been accepted as a good reason to drop anything if there are
>> still users of it, no matter how few (see pdp11 / vax backends,
>> osf/tru64 support, other random unmaintained backends, ...).
>>
>> What is different about arm-elf?
>>
>
> What's different is that there is a well-maintained arm-eabi port. The
> arm-elf port and all its legacy just gets in the way.
>
Imho you are taking a too narrow view here, because...
> The vax back-end only affects VAX; likewise for the PDP11 port.
...all this legacy just gets in the way of gcc as a whole. So I still
don't see the difference.
Nb, I don't oppose deprecating any arm stuff, but I just would like to
know if the justification also applies to other backends/ports.
Patched from me and others were rejected in the past even though the
situation was similar. Under what criteria would such patches now get
support from the RMs?
> I think it's critical that we don't let the tail wag the dog here.
Don't know what this means...
Ciao!
Steven