Re: ARM Ports BoF: armel in buster

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org>]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 06:57:40PM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Mon, 2017-08-28 at 06:53 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 9:49 PM, Roger Shimizu wrote:
> > 
> > > However, I think armel is time to transit to v5.
> > 
> > As someone who can no longer run Debian stable on his MIPS device due
> > to the CPU requirements bump in stretch, I'm not sure that bumping
> > CPU
> > requirements is a good idea in general. If there are actual benefits
> > to v5 as the default then bumping it could be a good idea.
> 
> IIRC some important part of the toolchain (gcc?) has bumped their
> baseline to v5 quite a while back, so we are already living on borrowed
> time wrt toolchain support. (This was from an ARM BoF several debconf's
> ago, I can't seem to find a reference right now though).
>...

In 2016 gcc 6 has deprecated (not yet removed) ARM prior to ARMv4t,[1]
which matches the armel baseline.

In 2017 gcc 7 has deprecated the non-Thumb ARMv5 variants
"which have no known implementations".[2]

What matters for buster is gcc 8, and there is no current deprecation
in gcc that would affect the armel port.

armel is a port on borrowed time since it supports old hardware
no longer supported elsewhere, but I am not aware of any serious
current problems in the toolchain.

> Ian.

cu
Adrian

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-6/changes.html
[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-7/changes.html

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