Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 0/4] catch up TILE-Gx support in DPDK

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas.monjalon@6wind.com>]

2017-02-17 20:52, Chris Metcalf:
> This patch series allows DPDK to build for TILE-Gx as of version 17.02.
> 
> A required library (libgxio) had not been made publicly available.
> It is now available as source here:
> 
>   http://www.mellanox.com/repository/solutions/tile-scm/libgxio-1.0.tar.xz
> 
> it has also been folded into the binary release of the generic
> toolchain that we periodically update on that website; for more
> information about the toolchain tarballs, see here:
> 
>   http://www.mellanox.com/repository/solutions/tile-scm/
> 
> Note that the toolchain components were updated slightly in this release
> of the tarballs relative to what was there before.

Thank you.
Some of these changes (being able to compile on a free toolchain) should
have been done since the beginning. Better later than never :)
I think we won't allow any new component in DPDK which cannot be built
freely, in the future (lessons learned).

> Hopefully, with DPDK now working on TILE-Gx again, there may be interest
> from someone in the community in taking on a maintenance role.  At this
> point, the Mellanox engineering team responsible for TILE-Gx is largely
> focused on working on future chips based on ARMv8, so unfortunately we
> won't have much bandwidth for TILE-Gx support going forward.

So do you mean that the TILE-Gx maintainers officially give up on their role?
Then please update the MAINTAINERS file.

> If it still seems like removal makes sense now or at some point in the
> future, it would probably at least be good to apply these patches so
> there is a baseline to pick it up from later.

I agree. We can apply these patches before removing the whole architecture.

> Liming Sun, the tile dpdk maintainer, has reviewed these changes (he
> sits next to me); if it's more appropriate, he can resend these changes
> with his Signed-off-by as well.  I took on this work since I was more
> familiar with libgxio and the details of our toolchain (I am the
> maintainer for the tile architecture for Linux and glibc).

I think it is OK as is.