On 4/18/24 10:06, Jeff Law wrote:
ACK. Just one more note to the wider audience. I looked at QEMU's user mode support for nios2 on/off over the last couple years. It never seemed to work well enough be able to run the GCC testsuite reliably.
I looked at the problems with the nios2 user-mode support in QEMU in some detail a few years ago. It looked like the problem was that it had copied the target syscall data structures from GLIBC and wasn't accounting for 32-bit target/64-bit host differences -- this particularly affected signal handling. I'm pretty sure we asked Intel if they wanted this fixed and they were not interested in pursuing that. The end result is that user-mode QEMU is not very useful for GLIBC or GDB testing.
As a result, my tester builds nios2 and will run the testsuite, but all the execution tests are only built, they're not actually run. It's been fairly stable, but its not doing in-depth testing.
Yes, as I noted in my previous message, there is nothing seriously wrong with the nios2 GCC port at present; it just seems kind of pointless to invest time in continuing to maintain it as a hobby when the architecture is dead. I think legacy customers generally would prefer to keep using the toolchains previously distributed by Altera/Intel or Mentor/Siemens instead of trying to build a new bleeding-edge toolchain from scratch, too.
-Sandra
