Fwd: Deprecation/removal of nios2 target support

[Joel Sherrill]

We should track this but if the GNU tools drop support, this is normally
the trigger for RTEMS.

Unless the support situation changes, I think we will have to remove nios2
in RTEMS 7

--joel

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Sandra Loosemore <sloosemore at baylibre.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 10:28 PM
Subject: Deprecation/removal of nios2 target support
To: <gcc at gcc.gnu.org>, <binutils at sourceware.org>, <
gdb-patches at sourceware.org>, <libc-alpha at sourceware.org>, Chung-Lin Tang <
cltang at baylibre.com>, <andrew at reenigne.org>, Yao Qi <qiyaoltc at gmail.com>
Cc: Dinh Nguyen <dinguyen at kernel.org>, <qemu-devel at nongnu.org>, <
newlib at sourceware.org>


Tomorrow I plan to push patches to mark the nios2 target as obsolete in
GCC 14.

Background: Intel has EOL'ed the Nios II processor IP and is now
directing their FPGA customers to a RISC-V platform instead.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/781327/intel-is-discontinuing-ip-ordering-codes-listed-in-pdn2312-for-nios-ii-ip.html

The Nios II hardware on loan from Intel that we were using for testing
at Mentor Graphics/Siemens was returned around the first of the year.
For some time we had been using QEMU to test the nios2-elf target, but
we never had a QEMU test harness set up that would boot the Linux
kernel, and user-mode QEMU on this target is too buggy/unmaintained to
use for primary testing.  So the current situation is that none of the
listed maintainers for any of the GNU toolchain components have access
to a fully working test configuration any more, we have all moved on to
new jobs and different projects, Intel has also moved on to a different
platform, and our former contacts on Intel's Nios II team have moved on
as well.  It seems like it's time to pull the plug.

Therefore I'd like to mark Nios II as obsolete in GCC 14 now, and remove
support from all toolchain components after the release is made.  I'm
not sure there is an established process for obsoleting/removing support
in other components; besides binutils, GDB, and GLIBC, there's QEMU,
newlib/libgloss, and the Linux kernel.  But, we need to get the ball
rolling somewhere.

I did do some GCC testing on both ELF and Linux Nios II targets around
the end of December and another round about a month ago, so I believe
GCC 14 will pretty much be in working order.  Beyond that, though, I
think it would be better to remove support promptly, rather than having
it hang around in an unmaintained/untestable zombie state, getting ever
more bit-rotten.

-Sandra
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