Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] configure: Warn about deprecated hosts

[Richard Henderson]

On 03/17/2017 09:52 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 17 March 2017 at 11:49, Daniel P. Berrange <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 11:08:22AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > > We plan to drop support in a future QEMU release for host OSes
> > > and host architectures for which we have no test machine where
> > > we can build and run tests. For the 2.9 release, make configure
> > > print a warning if it is run on such a host, so that the user
> > > has some warning of the plans and can volunteer to help us
> > > maintain the port if they need it to continue to function.
> > >
> > > This commit flags up as deprecated the CPU architectures:
> > >  * ia64
> > >  * sparc
> > >  * anything which we don't have a TCG port for
> > >    (and which was presumably using TCI)
> >
> > This seems to imply that if we remove supported for these architectures,
> > then TCI is no longer required either, or would there be other reasons
> > to want to keep TCI around, even when all host archs have a TCG port ?
>
> I've never really seen the point in TCI, but others do, which
> is why it's in the tree.

I don't see the point in TCI, because it's known to not work for any host that 
has non-trivial calling conventions.

You may recall I once did a re-write that did use libffi to overcome that 
problem.  However, you rightly pointed out at the time that it's just as easy 
to write a proper host backend if one actually cares.


r~