RFC: remove the "tile" architecture from glibc

[Chris Metcalf]

Good bye to all - I realize I did not include my contact information,
should it be useful for some reason to reach me after today.  You
can email me at

 Â  metcalf@alum.mit.edu

Thanks and bye!
Chris

On 12/1/2017 4:34 PM, Chris Metcalf wrote:
> The tile architecture was introduced to glibc in 2011 and first
> appeared in glibc 2.15.  The chip family of TILEPro and TILE-Gx was
> developed by Tilera, which was eventually acquired by Mellanox. Now
> at Mellanox we are developing new chips based on the ARM64
> architecture; our last TILE-Gx chip (the Gx72) was released in 2013,
> and our customers using the tile architecture products are now all in
> maintenance mode, as far as we know, and not looking to upgrade their
> software to newer open-source releases.
>
> Compounding this state of affairs is the fact that after twelve years
> here I am moving on next week; my last day at Mellanox is December
> 8th.  Since tracking upstream development of the old tile architecture
> is not a high priority for Mellanox, reasonably enough, it seems
> cleanest at this point to propose removal of the architecture from the
> glibc tree, so that the 2.26 release will be the last release to have
> tile support.
>
> If there is any desire to continue to support the tile architecture in
> glibc, I'm happy to hand off to someone else as maintainer.  I'm aware
> of one issue in the current code, which is that upstream gcc vector
> insn support has a bug in it that causes some of the string functions
> to misbehave; I can publish a fix for that before handing off, if 
> desired.
>
> I will in any case be dropping off the glibc list (other than perhaps
> occasionally reading the archives) at the end of next week.  It's been
> a rewarding experience following glibc's development over the last six
> years and I will certainly miss being part of this community.
>
> I'm keeping that libc.so.6 sticker I got from Carlos, though!  :)
>

-- 
Chris Metcalf, Mellanox Technologies
http://www.mellanox.com