Re: Sparc status ?

[Sébastien Bernard <sbernard@nerim.net>]

Le 20/04/2014 18:26, Patrick Baggett a écrit :

Also, a lot of the messages about "removing v8 support" or "upstream dropping sparc32" is confusing. SPARCv8, sometimes called "sparc32" (more specifically, 32-bit SPARCv8 ISA that predates the 64-bit ISA, SPARCv9) is used by just one CPU that is modern -- "Leon". The remaining CPUs are all 64-bit since 1997. However, a 32-bit ABI (note ABI, NOT ISA) used on a v9 platform seems like a sane idea, and that is the current case of Debian and Solaris. This is because it's absolutely a terrible idea to remove a 32-bit ABI for v9 CPUs. This ABI is called "v8+", which incidentally is a terrible name.

I don't care if Debian or other upstream packages drops "sparc32" aka "v8" support, because the current kernel will only boot on SPARCv9 CPUs, so it doesn't make any sense to add a constraint that "binaries must run on v8 CPUs". And I mostly don't care if GCC removes the ability to generate "sparc32" aka "SPARCv8" code. What I do care about it the removal of the ability to build 32-bit binaries on SPARCv9, because 64-bit only binaries is a ridiculous idea.

So Jurij, I don't see any reason to believe that "upstream support is disappearing". None of the messages are from GCC maintainers directly, and nothing on GCC's website about 4.7 / 4.8 states this to be the case.

Patrick

Ok, so,  if I make a long story short:
  first showstopper (a.k.a. no/partial upstream support from gcc) for jessie is a red herring, nothing should prevent the switch to the gcc-4.8 toolchain.
  second old kernel - Well, how to put that... the machine I have is running 3.13, so maybe the obligation to run old kernel does not really stand for all hardware.

Then, maybe sparc porter must tell debian release team that the two problem identified really aren't that much problem.

Seb