On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Steven Bosscher <stevenb....@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > > I would like to propose that support for Itanium1 be deprecated for > GCC 4.4 and removed for GCC 4.5. > > I doubt there are many Itanium 1 machines left in use (production or > even for hobbyists). The only Itanium1 that reached the market was the > Merced, AFAIK. But only a few 1000s of these were sold, in 2000/2001. > Most of them are probably not running anymore, and the ones still > working probably don't run ia64-linux so they don't need GCC. > > On the other side of the equation: The Itanium1 machine description > accounts for ~15% of the total ia64 back-end code, and it's probably > not very well tested. Both GCC and binutils are defaulted to tune for > Itanium 2 processors, so generating code for Itanium1 requires the > -mtune=itanium1 option. I can't find any test results in > gcc-testresults reported with -mtune=itanium1 [1]. Those people who > still use Itanium1 are probably better off if they stick with the > older GCC releases (pre-gcc-3.4) because at least back then, Itanium1 > received maybe some testing (there were regressions reported against > gcc 3.4, for example, by H.J. Lu). > > I understand that removing the back end is a big hammer. On the other > hand, this discussion has come up before, ~5 years ago (see e.g. > http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15653#c18) and basically > nothing has happened since then. > > It seems to me that removing obviously-unused code from a back end > that already perhaps doesn't get as much attention as it needs, is a > good idea... > Thoughts?
I think it is sensible to deprecate Itanium1 for 4.4. Thanks, Richard. > Ciao! > Steven > > > [1] > http://gcc.gnu.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?wm=wrd&form=extended&m=all&s=D&q=itanium1&ul=%2Fml%2Fgcc-testresults%2F%25 >
