Re: [gentoo-mips] Re: Reducing the number of the MIPS supported stages

[Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org>]

On 05/05/2014 08:19 PM, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
> On 05/05/2014 10:06 AM, Markos Chandras wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Right now the number of stages for each endianness is 8:
>>
>> - mips1
>> - mips32
>> - mips32r2
>> - mips3
>> - mips4
>> - mips4_r10
>> - mips64
>> - mips64r2
>>
>> ==> 16 stages in total.
>>
>> This takes quite a bit of time for all stages to be built (by the time
>> everything is built, we are one month passed the time the snapshot was
>> taken). How about stop building stages for mips1, mips3 and mips4? We
>> keep the existing stages on the mirrors but we will no longer update
>> them (or maybe we do on per user or per case basis). I understand
>> there is hardware for these ISAs but how often do people actually use
>> the new stages?
>>
>> Just to be clear, I am not suggesting for the team to stop supporting
>> these ISAs but to stop building new stages and let the users of such
>> ISAs, grab an old stage3 and do the update themselves if needed.
>>
>> This will free up some hardware resources for building different
>> stages for the newer ISAs (maybe more non-multilib n32 and n64
>> variants etc)
>>
>> What does everyone think?
>>
>> (CC'ing releng just to keep them in the loop)
>>
> 
> FYI, for uclibc I'm only doing big endian mips32r2 and little endian
> mips3 (aka mipsel3).  Those are in use (atheros ar71xx boards and
> lemote, respectively).
> 
> Since you can build a lower level ISA on a board capable of a higher
> level ISA, maybe you want to choose along those lines, eg you can build
> mips1 using catalyst on an ar71xx board running mips32r2.
> 

Yes there are a lot of options. Sadly we have no metrics on how many
people use the old ISA stages or how many of them build their own thing.
I don't want to decide anything by myself, I want to know what others
think and make a decision as a team and community (if we are going to
decide anything at all) :)

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras