On Fri, 8 Mar 2019 at 17:01, Sandra Loosemore <san...@codesourcery.com> wrote: > > On 3/8/19 9:04 AM, Peter Maydell wrote: > > Thanks. So who "owns" this ABI (ie has the authority to change > > it and should be the end documenting it)? How many projects or > > bits of software are implementing either end of it? > > Going back in ancient history, I implemented the m68k version in > libgloss in 2006 to support a hardware debug stub that CodeSourcery was > also providing at that time. We later moved the runtime side of it into > target-agnostic code in an internal library, so when it came time to do > a similar JTAG debug stub for bare-metal Nios II hardware testing in > 2012, we re-used our existing code for both library and debug stub. > Later Altera implemented the same protocol in some proprietary > simulators they provided to us, and more recently we wrote these patches > to add it to QEMU. We've shifted away from hardware testing and no > longer use the original debug stub now. > > > If we decide that QEMU owns the spec we can put the documentation > > into docs/specs/. > > Making QEMU the "owner" of the ABI seems a little peculiar to me since > it is only one client among several, and is a latecomer too. I think > libgloss would make a little more sense. OTOH, I have no problem with > making the documentation part of QEMU.
Thanks for the backstory. I agree that if QEMU is just one of multiple implementations then it's not a great place to hold the specification. Either libgloss, or I suppose in theory Altera as the owner of the architecture could bless the specification and host it... -- PMM