Hi all,

There are lots of packages that need porting to every new architecture
that comes along. There are others that don't require porting but
benefit in some way from porting to some aspect of the architecture.

In order to help porters to prioritise those packages and quickly add
support for their architecture, it would be nice to have a standard
mechanism for source packages to indicate that they potentially require
porting for each new architecture, the nature of the porting required
and where in the source package the changes are required.

For example packages like autotools-dev, linux, gcc or linuxinfo could
state that they require porting to all new arches and have a pointer to
Debian and or upstream porting info. Packages containing a JIT but with interpreter fallback could list themselves as having optional porting.

Once we have a mechanism for this, the documentation for creating new
Debian ports could provide a way to find the list of packages that need
porter attention; via codesearch.d.n, apt, apt-file, grep-available etc.

https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New

--
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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I like this idea. I would personally recommend adding negative priority
as well. You know, it is completely meaningless to port some high performance scientific computing software to archs like armel...

Meanwhile, different packages varies in the difficulty to port as well.
A software that heavily leverages architecture specific intrisics is not
likely easy to port. Packages that does not require hardware performance,
and simply misses several arch-specific C macros should be easy to port.

Since package maintainers should have somehow skimmed the whole codebase,
they could provide an accurate hint about this, as long as such hints
are useful for porters.

On Mon, 2022-06-06 at 10:02 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:

There are lots of packages that need porting to every new architecture
that comes along. There are others that don't require porting but
benefit in some way from porting to some aspect of the architecture.

In order to help porters to prioritise those packages and quickly add
support for their architecture, it would be nice to have a standard
mechanism for source packages to indicate that they potentially require porting for each new architecture, the nature of the porting required
and where in the source package the changes are required.

For example packages like autotools-dev, linux, gcc or linuxinfo could
state that they require porting to all new arches and have a pointer to Debian and or upstream porting info. Packages containing a JIT but with interpreter fallback could list themselves as having optional porting.

Once we have a mechanism for this, the documentation for creating new
Debian ports could provide a way to find the list of packages that need porter attention; via codesearch.d.n, apt, apt-file, grep-available etc.

https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Jun 06, Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote:

There are lots of packages that need porting to every new architecture
that comes along. There are others that don't require porting but
benefit in some way from porting to some aspect of the architecture.

Is this really worth the effort, considering that probably RISC-V is
going to be our last port for a very long time?

--
ciao,
Marco

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 10:47:38AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:

On Jun 06, Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote:

There are lots of packages that need porting to every new architecture
that comes along. There are others that don't require porting but
benefit in some way from porting to some aspect of the architecture.

Is this really worth the effort, considering that probably RISC-V is
going to be our last port for a very long time?

loongarch has just been merged into mainline kernel, is in binutils 2.38
and gcc 12, and those guys seems to be doing some serious work to get
into distributions.

Besides CPU archs, it looks worthwhile to investigate replacing glibc
with musl, which would represented as a new arch.

We may also want to raise ISA baseline in eg. amd64 -- with the amount
of old hardware in the wild, it'd certainly be done like armel->armhf
rather than i386->(really i686).


Meow!
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Loongarch's name is loong.
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 10:47:38AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:

Is this really worth the effort, considering that probably RISC-V is
going to be our last port for a very long time?

you mean like 640kb should be enough for everyone? :)


--
cheers,
Holger

⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ holger@(debian|reproducible-builds|layer-acht).org
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ OpenPGP: B8BF54137B09D35CF026FE9D 091AB856069AAA1C
⠈⠳⣄

Words may inspire but only action creates change.

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On Mon, 2022-06-06 at 10:47 +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:

Is this really worth the effort, considering that probably RISC-V is
going to be our last port for a very long time?

There are at least two or three new architectures in the pipeline
already. loongarch64 from Loongson was already mentioned, but there is
also already arc and probably arc64 from Synopsis. I'm not sure if
CHERI and ARM Morello will require a new arch, but ISTR they will.
If The Mill ever gets off the ground I expect there will be a Debian
port of that. There are also other CPU arches supported by Linux like
C-Sky as well as ideas for ports to various kernels and other things
like CloudABI or WASM. There are also perhaps rebootstrap-only ports
or full ports for moving baselines backwards or forwards like to
amd64v3 or MIPSr1, which Debian no longer supports but could easily
support and would enable Debian on hardware that currently ships.

https://wiki.debian.org/Ports/loongarch64
https://wiki.debian.org/Ports/arc
https://wiki.debian.org/Ideas/Ports

--
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Jun 06, Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> wrote:

Is this really worth the effort, considering that probably RISC-V is
going to be our last port for a very long time?

you mean like 640kb should be enough for everyone? :)

More like "free ABI is eating the world".

I do not see much future for the architectures mentioned here except
maybe loongarch64 as a geopolitical tool, but sure: no objections if the people who actually work on ports think this is worthwhile.
Maybe the usual suspects which require significant porting work could
start documenting instructions for porters in debian/README.source.

--
ciao,
Marco

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Mon, 2022-06-06 at 16:52 +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:

Maybe the usual suspects which require significant porting work could
start documenting instructions for porters in debian/README.source.

Thats a good start, but doesn't provide a standard way to find out
which packages contain such instructions. So maybe README.porting?

--
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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