RFC: Arm team to maintain additional compiler targets #851
Description
Per rust-lang/compiler-team#896, currently the following targets will be demoted to Tier 3 without new maintainers:
aarch64-unknown-none
aarch64-unknown-none-softfloat
armv7a-none-eabi
armv7r-none-eabi
armv7r-none-eabihf
armebv7r-none-eabi
armebv7r-none-eabihf
And the following target is already tier 3 but is worth including in the discussion:
armv8r-none-eabihf
We (the WG Arm team) could volunteer to maintain these targets in addition to the targets we already maintain. Keeping them tier 2 means they are shipped in rustc, which makes them much more accessible to potential users.
For the big endian targets armebv7r-none-eabi and armebv7r-none-eabihf we don't currently have any way to test these targets and the only open source emulator I'm aware of (qemu) does not have working support, so it might be realistic to let those drop to tier 3 unless and until someone with interest and actual hardware wants to help out. For the other targets they are either quite commonly available or at least quite easily emulated, so it's practical for us to test Rust firmware on them. For armv8r-none-eabihf there's been interest in having this promoted to tier 2 as it's an interesting target with accelerating bare-metal usage that would be made a lot easier if it was included in rustc.
I'm opening this issue to discuss with other Arm team members - is there interest in supporting these targets alongside the ones we currently support? It's not much work, until something comes up with the target that needs fixing. We should have some regular tests run on these platforms via emulator in CI.
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