Re: Debian drops support for sparc

[Patrick Baggett <baggett.patrick@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org> wrote:

> But I think the focus should probably be on the sheer redness of the sparc
> columns at:
> https://release.debian.org/jessie/arch_qualify.html (current release)

>From the link above:
"
sparc

Upstream Support

According to the gcc maintainer 32bit code generation as we use it is no longer supported upstream and we should aim for a switch to 64bit userland anytime soon.
"

Is it correct that 32bit gcc is no longer maintained?
I have seen nothing on gcc mailaing list about this.

I've challenged this assertion, too. I don't see any evidence of it being true. 32-bit userland makes sense for most RISC architectures because the increased code/memory size for switching to 64-bit apps is not justified in most cases. x86 is the weird case that 64-bit code can run faster due to more registers, an efficient calling convention, and %rip relative addressing. Even Solaris 10+ (which only supports 64-bit sparc kernels) has a 32-bit userland for this reason. I think that, of all people, the gcc sparc maintainers, understand this.

I can only guess what "32bit code generation as we use it" means, but I doubt that it means "32-bit code targeting sparcv9 ISA".

Patrick