Re: Deprecation of the LM32 target

[Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>]

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