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

[Liming Sun]

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

Yes. Please update the MAINTAINERS file as needed.
Chris Metcalf is out this week. I could submit a separate patch for the MAINTAINERS file if it's required. Or we could wait a little bit until Chris comes back.

Thanks,
Liming

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Monjalon [mailto:thomas.monjalon at 6wind.com] 
Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2017 4:30 AM
To: Chris Metcalf
Cc: Vincent JARDIN; Bruce Richardson; Jerin Jacob; Olivier Matz; Liming Sun; Olga Shern; Yael Shenhav; dev at dpdk.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] catch up TILE-Gx support in DPDK

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.