[Buildroot] ARC support in Buildroot

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello Alexey, Hello ARC maintainers,

I am reaching out to you to understand the interest that you have (or
no longer have) with the ARC support in Buildroot.

Indeed, we haven't seen any updates from ARC people in a long time. Our
toolchain components for ARC are stuck at arc-2020.09, which is quite
old as I've noticed you have release much newer versions of
gcc/binutils/gdb. Also, some of that ARC support has been upstreamed I
guess.

Is there still some interest at Synopsys in maintaining the ARC support
in Buildroot? If not, we would probably want to get rid of the support
for this CPU architecture.

Side question, is there an emulated platform that is freely available
we could use to do runtime testing of ARC? I very quickly looked at the
4 defconfigs we have, but none of them seem to be related to a freely
available emulated platform. And in fact, only one of the defconfigs
seem to have a readme.txt to indicate how to use it.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, co-owner and CEO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering and training
https://bootlin.com