On Fri, May 03, 2024 at 06:53:45PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > Hello Arnd, > > On Fri, 2024-05-03 at 10:11 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > I had investigated dropping support for alpha EV5 and earlier a while > > ago after noticing that this is the only supported CPU family > > in the kernel without native byte access and that Debian has already > > dropped support for this generation last year [1] after it turned > > out to be broken. > > That's not quite correct. Support for older Alphas is not broken and > always worked when I tested it. It's just that some people wanted to > raise the baseline in order to improve code performance on newer machines > with the hope to fix some minor issues we saw on Alpha here and there. > > > This topic came up again when Paul E. McKenney noticed that > > parts of the RCU code already rely on byte access and do not > > work on alpha EV5 reliably, so I refreshed my series now for > > inclusion into the next merge window. > > Hrrrm? That sounds like like Paul ran tests on EV5, did he? Arnd does say "noticed", not "tested". No Alpha CPUs here, and I don't run Alpha emulators. There is only so much time in each day and only so much budget for electricity. ;-) For the series: Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxx> > > Al Viro did another series for alpha to address all the known build > > issues. I rebased his patches without any further changes and included > > it as a baseline for my work here to avoid conflicts. > > It's somewhat strange that Al improves code on the older machines only > to be axed by your series. I would prefer such removals to aimed at an > LTS release, if possible. Once they are in mainline, you are within your rights to send Al's code-improvement patches to -stable, which should get them to the LTS releases. It might well be that Arnd was planning to do just that. Thanx, Paul > Adrian > > -- > .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz > : :' : Debian Developer > `. `' Physicist > `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
