Deprecation/removal of nios2 target support

[Dinh Nguyen]

On 4/18/24 13:41, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2024, at 17:44, Joseph Myers wrote:
>> On Wed, 17 Apr 2024, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
>>
>>> Therefore I'd like to mark Nios II as obsolete in GCC 14 now, and remove
>>> support from all toolchain components after the release is made.  I'm not sure
>>> there is an established process for obsoleting/removing support in other
>>> components; besides binutils, GDB, and GLIBC, there's QEMU, newlib/libgloss,
>>> and the Linux kernel.  But, we need to get the ball rolling somewhere.
>>
>> CC:ing Arnd Bergmann regarding the obsolescence in the Linux kernel.
> 
> We have not yet marked nios2 as deprecated in the kernel, but that
> is mostly because the implementation does not get in the way too
> much and Dinh Nguyen is still around as a maintainer and merging
> bugfixes.
> 
> Almost all nios2 kernel changes I see in the past decade have been
> done blindly without testing on hardware, either for treewide
> changes, or by code inspection. The only notable exceptions I could
> find are from Andreas Oetken and Bernd Weiberg at Siemens and
> from Marek Vasut (all added to Cc in case they have something to add).
> 
> We should probably remove nios2 from the kernel in the near future,
> but even if we decide not to, I think deprecating it from gcc is the
> right idea: If there are a few remaining users that still plan
> to update their kernels, gcc-14 will still be able to build new
> kernels for several years.
> 

I'm planning to do this soon.

Dinh