On 26/12/2020 10.06, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Hello!
On 12/26/20 9:39 AM, Thomas Huth wrote:
the problem is not that the target CPU is old, but rather that according to the
(former?) maintainer, there are no users left:
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg605024.html
So it got marked as deprecated in this commit here:
https://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=commitdiff;h=d84980051229fa43c96b3
Without maintainer and without users, there is no point in keeping this target,
is there?
I'm not sure how you determine whether there are people using the code or not.
There
is no really user tracking in QEMU, is there?
And the maintainer's claim that RISC-V takes over makes no sense either. The
point of
emulators is to be able to run old and existing software. If a target had only a
justification to exist while it's commercially viable, you would have to remove
90%
of the targets in QEMU.
I mean, the whole point of an emulator is being able to run existing code on
modern hardware,
usually because the old hardware is no longer available. And as long as the
target is
functional, I don't see a point in taking away the functionality.
You also have to consider that it takes some effort to keep code up to date,
e.g. if there is a bigger restructuring of the code base going on, you also
have to work on neglected targets, too. If there is no active maintainer
left anymore, it's quite a burden for all the other developers.
So if there is no known user left (are *you* using lm32?), and there is no
active maintainer anymore, it's IMHO adequate to mark a target as
deprecated. If someone still wants to run old lm32 code, they still can use
older versions of QEMU to do this.
Thomas
