Re: Please don't deprecate i386 for GCC 4.8

[Ralf Corsepius <ralf dot corsepius at googlemail dot com>]

On 12/14/2012 10:09 PM, Richard Biener wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 9:16 PM, Robert Dewar <dewar@adacore.com> wrote:
> > On 12/14/2012 3:13 PM, Cynthia Rempel wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > RTEMS still supports the i386, and there are many i386 machines still
> > > in use.  Deprecating the i386 will negatively impact RTEMS ability to
> > > support the i386.  As Steven Bosscher said, the "benefits" are small,
> > > and the impact would be serious for RTEMS i386 users.
> >
> > Since there is a significant maintenance burden for such continued
> > support, I guess a question to ask is whether the RTEMS folks or
> > someone using RTEMS are willing to step in and shoulder this burden.
>
> Btw, while I see very sporadical testresults for arm-rtems and older results
> for v850 and sparc and powerpc-rtems testresult posting on gcc-testresults
Correct. These results are side-effects of works from people who 
currently are working with these architectures, facing problems  or 
porting RTEMS to these targets.

This doesn't mean the other targets aren't used nor non functional, 
because RTEMS targets usually only are variants from the corresponding 
newlib-elf targets.

> no such results exist for i386-rtems in 2012 which means it's current status
> is in the dark.
More or less correct.

Older ix86-rtems-gcc's are known to work, newer ix86-rtems-gccs are 
known to have not yet fully understood problems (Related to soft-float 
math, i386 and not using a linux-libc).

> If you want a port to be live show that it is live by posting regular
> testresults to gcc-testresults.
Not all of this world is Linux nor backed by large teams at $$$$ 
companies :)  We simply do not have the resources do to this.

Ralf