Re: FreeBSD mips support

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 02:01:21PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I think it may be about time to remove MIPS support from the tree. The last
> major users have moved on, and the port suffers from a number of problems
> on modern systems with modern workloads. We have a number of workarounds in
> the tree for different aspects of the mips port that we could retire as
> well...
> 
> I'd like to propose removal of mips from -current soon, say by the end of
> the year.

It's time for MIPS to go.  It's never been broadly maintained and
the codebase has always been a bit odd contributing to the maintenance
burden of the project as a whole.

Over the last decade, most mips64 maintenance has been by the CHERI
project at SRI International and the University of Cambridge.  We
published some well-cited papers and it has had major impacts on Arm's
Morello prototype architecture.  However, over the past three-ish years
we've moved our work to RISC-V and Morello.  At this point we have no
active projects that depend on MIPS and we'll likely respond to future
significant merge conflicts in the sys/mips tree by removing our local
changes.

-- Brooks

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