On Wed, 18 Dec 2024 08:20:46 PST (-0800), jeffreya...@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/17/24 5:11 PM, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
This came up on IRC this morning and we talked a bit on the patchwork
call this morning. I'm not really sure what the right answer is here,
but it seems at least reasonable to talk about -- we've got a lot more
testing these days are we've been somewhat reasonable about following
the release stages. Either way it looks like a mailing list discussion
and this seems like the easiest way to start it.
I figured it'd be best to start with just rv64gc, as that's the target
that is widley used by distros and has hardware to test on. Hopefully
at some point we'll add a more exciting target, but it seems safer to
start with something small.
Just to be explicit for the wider community. I'm on board, we're
starting from a relatively conservative place, but that seems like the
right thing to do.
Ya, thanks :)
I can easily see pushing this towards rv64gc with bitmanip+vector in the
future.
I agree lacking B and V makes us very clearly uncompetitive in the space
where these sort of things matter (ie, binary compatible distros and
long term stability type things) -- the gap is just too big to close by
doing clever things in the hardware. Maybe just B and V isn't enough,
it's hard to tell, but lacking them seems pretty clearly uncompetitive.
I'm not sure B is so scary on the SW side of things, it's been mostly
performance issues we've been fixing. V is huge, though, and we've
generally found a bunch of V-related functional codegen bugs. Without
reliable hardware to test against (and do distro builds and such) it
just seems premature to declare that being as stable as the other ports
on the list.
So hopefully we'll get there some day. If people feel we're ready then
I'm happy to give it a shot -- we certainly need to get there some day,
I just don't want to declare we're ready too early.
Jeff
