RFC: Dropping i386/soft-float and 386ex BSPs

[Rehab Massoud]

Hi,

I believe that some of the i386ex and ts386ex BSPs & the i386/soft-float
multilib are still used for educational purposes and/or for some simulators.
I'd vote for not removing them, and if anyway they will be removed it would
be nice to leave a remark somewhere to the latest version that have them as
a reference for who may be looking for them.

--Rehab

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Ralf Corsepius <ralf.corsepius at rtems.org>wrote:

> On 02/15/2011 03:34 PM, Joel Sherrill wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am wondering if the time has come to drop support for
>> x86 w/o HW FPU (e.g. multilibs with software floating
>> point. I do not know of any CPUs currently available
>> which match this profile. If there are any x86
>> w/o HW FPU available, please correct me.
>>
>> Periodically gcc breaks for this because no one else even
>> builds this variation except RTEMS. This alone is not
>> justification but it is a serious hint this configuration is
>> WAY past its prime.
>>
>>  From a practical viewpoint, this would likely involve:
>>
>> + dropping the i386ex and ts386ex BSPs
>> + dropping i386/soft-float multilib variant
>> + maybe dropping i486/soft-float
>> + probably moving minimum CPU assumption to 486
>> in GCC for i386-rtems gcc.
>>
>> Any thoughts? Anyone care about i386DX w/o FPU,
>> i386ex, and 486sx?
>>
>
> It's been 2 weeks since you asked ...
>
> ... Till responded he believes the i386 may have a user-base,
>
> ... I would expect these multilibs make sense for testing purposes and
> could be required by some emulators.
>
> ... nobody replied to the proposal to remove "i386ex" and "ts386ex"-BSPs.
>
>
> From this, I conclude,
> - it's not clear whether these multilib have a user-base.
>
> - the i386ex and ts386ex BSPs don't seem to have an active user-base.
>
> Proposal: Let's remove the i386ex and tx386ex BSP _NOW_.
>
> Should somebody start yelling in near future, we could resort to restoring
> them in CVS, should somebody start yelling next month, he simply "has lost".
>
> Ralf
>
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