[OpenPower-Firmware] Time to drop POWER8 support from

[Matevz Langus]

Hi all,

we have a couple of Habanero servers but Tyan, not IBM and we have used 
recent op-build on those.
We could do that in the future if it is of any need.

regards,
   Matevz

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2019 16:29:16 +1000
> From: Stewart Smith <stewart at linux.ibm.com>
> To: openpower-firmware at lists.ozlabs.org, artemsen at gmail.com, Joel
> 	Stanley <joel at jms.id.au>, Nicholas E Bofferding <bofferdn at us.ibm.com>,
> 	luis.fernandez at ibm.com, Dean Sanner <dsanner at us.ibm.com>
> Subject: [OpenPower-Firmware] Time to drop POWER8 support from
> 	op-build?
> Message-ID: <8736jp6jb7.fsf at linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain
>
> Hi all,
>
> The current state of POWER8 platforms is that only OpenBMC or FSP based ones
> get any testing - namely palmetto, vesnin, and firenze (which is special
> as that doesn't involve an op-build built hostboot).
>
> The other POWER8 platforms, namely barreleye, firestone, garrison,
> habanero, and p8dtu are, effectively, unmaintained and untested
> upstream.While there's no barrier (apart from developer time) to p8dtu,
> the others don't have a functional OpenBMC port, which limits our
> ability to run the op-test suite against them.
>
> A few things have come up recently that challenge our ability to
> continue to have POWER8 platforms remain in the op-build tree.
>
> Currently, all platforms build with a GCC6 based toolchain. In an
> upcoming buildroot release, this will no longer be possible to do (see
> discussion over on the buildroot patch:
> https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/1119341/ ).
>
> The barrier to just switching to a more modern GCC is hostboot, and
> since Hostboot forked for POWER8 and POWER9 systems, hostboot commit
> 4995ec0ba6f15e03deb4b9ad1dc215f3f8993acb and
> https://github.com/open-power/op-build/pull/2803/ look to bring Hostboot
> for *POWER9* up to a point where it can be built with a more modern
> toolchain, there does not currently exist any fixes for Hostboot for
> POWER8.
>
> It appears that there's also no budgeted time for IBM engineers to work
> on backporting the GCC8 build fixes to POWER8 hostboot, and our testing
> platforms are rather limited (only Palmetto, and even then, we have
> *maybe* one or two that are reliable).
>
> While we could look at having two separate toolchains, the upcoming
> buildroot change would mean we just have the problem postponed for a
> couple of months.
>
> As such, I'd like to propose the following:
>
> The upcoming op-build v2.4 release will be the last to support the
> barreleye, firestone, garrison, habanero, and p8dtu platforms.
>
> For support for palmetto and vesnin to continue we need someone to step
> up to maintain Hostboot for POWER8, notably ensuring it builds (and
> boots) with GCC8. In the absense of someone coming forward in the next
> week or so, I propose we also remove support for these platforms after
> tagging v2.4.
>
> Thoughts?
>