cvs commit: src Makefile

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 25 May 2008, John Birrell wrote:

> The last time I checked, the sun4v port wouldn't even boot on my T2000, so I 
> have to ask if there is anyone who even knows that. Or cares. Just keeping 
> the code compiling is not good enough. It has to actually work.

No one would argue that compiling is sufficient, but it's certainly a 
prerequisite for making any progress at all.  If people building universe 
can't spare an extra 10% of the build time for sun4v (or whatever it is), then 
we should presumably delete sun4v now, because if it's not in the universe 
build it will no longer build within weeks, and be quite difficult to get to 
build within months.

> I haven't removed any support for building sun4v. I just think that the few 
> people who do build universe shouldn't have to wait for a dead port to 
> build.

I think you should consider backing out the change -- the point of "make 
universe" is to build as much as we possibly can of the tree, including all 
variations on architectures, as many obscure kernel configurations as we can 
find, etc.  People run make universe to confirm that their changes haven't 
broken the build for as many cases as possible, and sun4v remains a valid case 
to detect.

If you think we should write off sun4v at this point, which may well be a 
valid proposal, we should have the larger discussion about that before we 
remove it from make universe unless we have a pretty practical reason 
otherwise (i.e., dtrace and sun4v are fundamentally incompatible).

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge