Re: Proposed roadmap to 1.0

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 10:20:45PM -0700, Isaac wrote:
> > 1.0.0
> > Projected release: Early fall
> > Key targets:
> > - Polished documentation.
> > - Organized and coordinated publicity plan.
> > - At least one new exciting addition to make the release noteworthy,
> >   but which has no chance of breaking things that work. Best candidate
> >   would be one or more new ports, labeled experimental.
> 
> How about s390 and ia64? ;-)

s390 looks like a maybe. I'm not sufficiently familiar with it to call
it a no, and Rob seemed interested in supporting it at one time.

ia64 is nothing but gratuitous incompatibility and arch-specific code
where it doesn't belong, all for an arch that was dead before it was
launched. I think it's officially dead now even, or maybe that's just
wishful thinking.

> All joking aside, I'd say +1. 
> And for ports, arm64, mips64 or mips n32, x32, and/or sh seem like
> interesting targets. 

Agreed, all of those look interesting. Super H might be another
candidate; IIRC it was used on some game consoles and automotive
control computers.

> While sparc is not "dead", basically leon is the only sparc cpu that is 
> alive and likely to provide an interested audience.
> And that's sparc32.

I don't really know much about sparc except that the register windows
system looks ugly.

> m68k/coldfire are 32-bit only, slow, and largely obsolete with little 
> prospect of new development (Freescale is working on ppc and arm systems),
> but there is some use of them in the embedded market, so I could imagine a
> port being useful to someone.

m68k is in some ways an arch I'd like to avoid, but if it's
interesting to people we could do it.

> Do we currently support 64-bit ppc?

No, but 32-bit apps can run on 64-bit kernel as far as I know. I was
just looking at the 64-bit ABI earlier today and it's rather
gratuitously ugly, but probably not too hard to support.

> ia64 appears to be limited in use/dying, besides not being the ideal target.
> (big iron, and you'd pretty much need to interest Oracle and similar companies
> before you get much use).
> hppa and alpha are most interesting for a computer historian.

Is hppa the same as pa-risc? If so, it's one I'd definitely like to
omit. It's the only machine with a stack that grows upward, so it's a
good deal of added generality required for just one arch. And of
course like you say it's of interest only to historians.

Alpha was kind of interesting, but it's just as dead I think... If I
remember right, the kernel support was broken for years and nobody
realized...

> m32r is live, but I'm not aware of much interest.
> tilera and epiphany (the Parallela coprocessor) sound interesting,
> but are likely to be limited in availability.

Not familiar with them, but my guess would be they're interesting. In
embedded, everything has niche uses. On the high-end server side, on
the other hand, anything but x86_64 (for straight power) or ARM (for
cutting the primary cost of a data center: electricity) is madness. In
other words, I think there's a lot more value in supporting diversity
on the embedded side than on the enterprise side.

Rich