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? 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
