On Fri, 3 May 2024, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz 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. I'm not quite happy to see pre-EV5 support go as EV45 is all the Alpha hardware I have and it's only owing to issues with the firmware of my console manager hardware that I haven't deployed it at my lab yet for Linux and GNU toolchain verification. I'd rather I wasn't stuck with an obsolete version of Linux. > > 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? What exactly is required to make it work? Maciej
