[PATCH-for-5.2] target/mips: Deprecate nanoMIPS ISA

[Vince Del Vecchio]

[Sorry for the resend; original seems to have been corrupted]

On 11/2/20 12:27 PM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> The nanoMIPS ISA has been announced in 2018 for various projects:
> 
> GCC:   https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2018-05/msg00012.html
> Linux: https://lwn.net/Articles/753605/
> QEMU:  
> https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg530721.html
> 
> Unfortunately the links referenced doesn't work anymore (www.mips.com).
> 
> From this Wayback machine link [1] we can get to a working place to 
> download a toolchain (a more recent release than the one referenced in 
> the announcement mails):
> http://codescape.mips.com/components/toolchain/nanomips/2018.04-02/dow
> nloads.html
> 
> ...
> 
> Our deprecation policy do not allow feature removal before 2 release, 
> therefore declare the nanoMIPS ISA code deprecated as of QEMU 5.2.
> This gives time to developers to update the QEMU community, or 
> interested parties to step in to maintain this code.

Hi Philippe & everyone,

Apologies for the late response.

MediaTek is using the nanoMIPS architecture and is now doing nanoMIPS toolchain development.  I believe Wave/MIPS are not any longer, so you can probably say we are taking over nanoMIPS toolchain development.

We have just published a new release of the toolchain at
https://github.com/MediaTek-Labs/nanomips-gnu-toolchain/releases/tag/nanoMIPS-2021.02-01
and we have started work on upgrading the toolchain to the latest versions in preparation for upstreaming.  (We are also investigating an LLVM port.)

We are also willing to act as maintainers for the QEMU nanoMIPS port, and we have agreement with the current and former MIPS QEMU maintainers (Aleksandar Rikalo & Aleksandar Markovic, both from Syrmia) to help us in this process if needed.

To sum up, nanoMIPS is alive and in active development, so based on your criteria it should remain supported in QEMU.  Please let us know how else we can help with this process.

-Vince Del Vecchio
Compiler Team Lead & Deputy Director, DSP Core Technology MediaTek, Inc.