[RFC/RFA] Obsolete Cell Broadband Engine SPU targets

[Eric Gallager]

On 4/2/19, Ulrich Weigand <uweigand@de.ibm.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> the spu-elf target in GCC supports generating code for the SPU processors
> of the Cell Broadband Engine; it has been part of upstream GCC since 2008.
>
> However, at this point I believe this target is no longer in use:
> - There is no supported Cell/B.E. hardware any more.

Wait, SPU includes the Playstation 3, right? I'm pretty sure there are
still plenty of PS3s in use out there... AFAIK my university (GWU) is
still running its PS3 supercomputer cluster... (I'd have to check to
make sure...)

> - There is no supported operating system supporting Cell/B.E. any more.
>
> I've still been running daily regression tests until now, but I'll be
> unable to continue to do so much longer since the systems I've been
> using for this will go away.
>
> Rather than leave SPU support untested/maintained, I'd therefore
> propose to declare all SPU targets obsolete in GCC 9 and remove
> the code with GCC 10.
>
> Any objections to this approach?
>
> Bye,
> Ulrich
>
>
> gcc/ChangeLog:
>
> 	* config.gcc: Mark spu* targets as deprecated/obsolete.
>
> Index: gcc/config.gcc
> ===================================================================
> --- gcc/config.gcc	(revision 270076)
> +++ gcc/config.gcc	(working copy)
> @@ -248,6 +248,7 @@ md_file=
>  # Obsolete configurations.
>  case ${target} in
>    *-*-solaris2.10*			\
> +  | spu*-*-*				\
>    | tile*-*-*				\
>   )
>      if test "x$enable_obsolete" != xyes; then
> --
>   Dr. Ulrich Weigand
>   GNU/Linux compilers and toolchain
>   Ulrich.Weigand@de.ibm.com
>
>