Re: Removing dpkg arch definitions for uclinux-any?
Hi!
On Mon, 2023-11-13 at 21:41:48 +0900, Simon Richter wrote:
> On 13.11.23 19:08, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > I was checking for dpkg arch definitions to cleanup and stumbled over
> > the uclinux-any ones (added as part of #455501), where I noticed the
> > µCLinux fork got merged into mainline Linux in 2.5.46, and then
> > several of the no-MMU ports got removed from there more recently.
>
> I must admit that I haven't really used uClinux, or rather any MMUless
> architecture in ages, and the company that I originally wrote this for (and
> which did indeed run an internal Debian mirror with packages for a
> big-endian MMUless ARM box running uClinux) has since shut down, so I
> believe there are no users left.
>
> I'm not sure if it's entirely dead or just about to get a resurgence because
> of FPGAs and FPGA SoCs with integrated hard CPUs that are gaining in
> popularity.
>
> On the pure FPGA side, my expectation is that if it runs Linux, it will have
> an MMU.
>
> The major commercial soft CPUs, Microblaze and NiosII, have MMU designs with
> very little overhead (basically, a TLB and a processor mode for the TLB miss
> handler to run in), so there is little incentive to run MMUless.
>
> RISC-V, ARM and SPARC implementations for FPGAs might be interesting to run
> MMUless (because their MMU interface standards take a lot of resources to
> implement), but I'm not aware of anyone actually doing that.
>
> On the SoC side, I think most available ICs contain an MMU, and those that
> don't aren't really used with Linux (there are some MMUless Cortex-R cores
> that can address enough memory, but I doubt that's a practical concern).
>
> So I think these can be removed.
Thanks for the background info! I'll then queue the patch removing
these.
Regards,
Guillem
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