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Re: Deprecating ARM FPA support
- From: Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>
- To: Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at arm dot com>
- Cc: "Joseph S. Myers" <joseph at codesourcery dot com>, Martin Guy <martinwguy at gmail dot com>, Joel Sherrill <joel dot sherrill at oarcorp dot com>, "gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org" <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>, pedro at codesourcery dot com, Nathan Sidwell <nathan at codesourcery dot com>, ljrittle at acm dot org, joel at oarcorp dot com, ralf dot corsepius at rtems dot org, thorpej at netbsd dot org, krister dot walfridsson at gmail dot com
- Date: Mon, 24 May 2010 06:49:04 -0700
- Subject: Re: Deprecating ARM FPA support
- References: <AANLkTimkz9SCy1XXHOsduUsboMv-yi4DYFxkCljPdCqO@mail.gmail.com> <1274689403.17090.23.camel@e102346-lin.cambridge.arm.com> <Pine.LNX.4.64.1005241112020.14000@digraph.polyomino.org.uk> <1274705467.3031.36.camel@e102346-lin.cambridge.arm.com>
Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> Don't know. Does a document specifying it even exist? If we are
> supporting an ABI, then I think we need to have a publicly available
> SPEC.
I disagree with that statement. If a system is sufficiently popular, we
probably want to support it -- with or without a specification. For
example, if x86 Windows didn't have a public ABI specification, we'd
still want to support it.
> I don't think so. Certainly NetBSD doesn't; I can't speak for the rest.
> In fact, I'm pretty sure that only the old linux ABI uses the FPA.
I'm certain VxWorks makes no use of FPA. However, whether it changes to
EABI or not is not purely up to the GCC maintainers; Wind River uses the
Diab compiler on VxWorks as well, and VxWorks is an environment where
stability over time is considered very important. On the other hand,
it's going to be a long time before VxWorks gets to GCC 4.7, so there's
time to work this out.
> Certainly removing support for FPA (and any targets that require it) as
> a first step would be an option; but we should also focus on where we
> want to get to.
I agree with that. But, it would also be interesting to know just how
broken that code is. If, in fact, FPA and/or ARM ELF mostly work at
present, then there's less call for actually removing (as opposed to
deprecating) things. If, on the other hand, they've been broken for
several releases, then there's good evidence that nobody really cares
about new versions of GCC supporting these things.
--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery
mark@codesourcery.com
(650) 331-3385 x713