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From:   Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Date:   Tue, 25 Jun 2019 14:50:01 +0200
Message-ID: <CAK8P3a3irwwwCQ_kPh5BTg-jGGbJOj=3fhVrTDBUZgH1V7bpFQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] remove arch/sh?
To:     John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>
Cc:     Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Yoshinori Sato <ysato@users.sourceforge.jp>,
        Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>,
        Linux-sh list <linux-sh@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-arch <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 2:02 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> Adam,
>
> On 6/25/19 1:21 PM, Adam Borowski wrote:
> >> We're still using sh4 in Debian
> >
> > I wouldn't call it "used": it has popcon of 1, and despite watching many
> > Debian channels, I don't recall hearing a word about sh4 in quite a while.
>
> So, according to your logic, Debian should drop the mips64el (popcon 1)
> and riscv64 ports (popcon 2) [1]?
>
> > Hardware development is dead: we were promised modern silicon by j-core
> > after original patents expired, but after J2 nothing happened, there was
> > silence from their side, and now https://j-core.org is down.
>
> It's not dead. You can still run it on an FPGA, the code is freely available.
> Plus, the architecture seems to be still in use in the industry [2].

It would be nice if one of the maintainers or the remaining users could go
through the code though and figure out which bits are definitely dead
(e.g. sh5), don't build, or are incomplete and not worked on for a long
time, compared to the bits that are known to work and that someone
is still using or at least playing with.
I guess a lot of the SoCs that have no board support other than
the Hitachi/Renesas reference platform can go away too, as any products
based on those boards have long stopped updating their kernels.

       Arnd