Fwd: RFC: remove the "tile" architecture from glibc

Fwd: RFC: remove the "tile" architecture from glibc

[Jeff Law]

Something to consider... I'm not suggesting we remove at this point, it
really depends on whether or not Walter wants to continue to maintain
the bits.


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: RFC: remove the "tile" architecture from glibc
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2017 16:34:09 -0500
From: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@mellanox.com>
To: GNU C Library <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>

The tile architecture was introduced to glibc in 2011 and first
appeared in glibc 2.15.  The chip family of TILEPro and TILE-Gx was
developed by Tilera, which was eventually acquired by Mellanox.  Now
at Mellanox we are developing new chips based on the ARM64
architecture; our last TILE-Gx chip (the Gx72) was released in 2013,
and our customers using the tile architecture products are now all in
maintenance mode, as far as we know, and not looking to upgrade their
software to newer open-source releases.

Compounding this state of affairs is the fact that after twelve years
here I am moving on next week; my last day at Mellanox is December
8th.  Since tracking upstream development of the old tile architecture
is not a high priority for Mellanox, reasonably enough, it seems
cleanest at this point to propose removal of the architecture from the
glibc tree, so that the 2.26 release will be the last release to have
tile support.

If there is any desire to continue to support the tile architecture in
glibc, I'm happy to hand off to someone else as maintainer.  I'm aware
of one issue in the current code, which is that upstream gcc vector
insn support has a bug in it that causes some of the string functions
to misbehave; I can publish a fix for that before handing off, if desired.

I will in any case be dropping off the glibc list (other than perhaps
occasionally reading the archives) at the end of next week.  It's been
a rewarding experience following glibc's development over the last six
years and I will certainly miss being part of this community.

I'm keeping that libc.so.6 sticker I got from Carlos, though!  :)

-- 
Chris Metcalf, Mellanox Technologies
http://www.mellanox.com