Re: Deprecating Itanium1 for GCC 4.4

[Richard Guenther <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Steven Bosscher <stevenb.gcc@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I would like to propose that support for Itanium1 be deprecated for
> GCC 4.4 and removed for GCC 4.5.
>
> I doubt there are many Itanium 1 machines left in use (production or
> even for hobbyists). The only Itanium1 that reached the market was the
> Merced, AFAIK. But only a few 1000s of these were sold, in 2000/2001.
> Most of them are probably not running anymore, and the ones still
> working probably don't run ia64-linux so they don't need GCC.
>
> On the other side of the equation: The Itanium1 machine description
> accounts for ~15% of the total ia64 back-end code, and it's probably
> not very well tested. Both GCC and binutils are defaulted to tune for
> Itanium 2 processors, so generating code for Itanium1 requires the
> -mtune=itanium1 option. I can't find any test results in
> gcc-testresults reported with -mtune=itanium1 [1]. Those people who
> still use Itanium1 are probably better off if they ?stick with the
> older GCC releases (pre-gcc-3.4) because at least back then, Itanium1
> received maybe some testing (there were regressions reported against
> gcc 3.4, for example, by H.J. Lu).
>
> I understand that removing the back end is a big hammer. ?On the other
> hand, this discussion has come up before, ~5 years ago (see e.g.
> http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15653#c18) and basically
> nothing has happened since then.
>
> It seems to me that removing obviously-unused code from a back end
> that already perhaps doesn't get as much attention as it needs, is a
> good idea...
> Thoughts?

I think it is sensible to deprecate Itanium1 for 4.4.

Thanks,
Richard.

> Ciao!
> Steven
>
>
> [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?wm=wrd&form=extended&m=all&s=D&q=itanium1&ul=%2Fml%2Fgcc-testresults%2F%25
>