Dear Adrian,
On 27.09.23 19:41, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On Wed, 2023-09-27 at 19:25 +0200, Frank Scheiner wrote:
While it's great that someone is willing to take care of the kernel port, >>> we're still in the situation that the toolchain on ia64 is unmaintained
and has many issues.
@Adrian:
Say, wasn't that the case for how many years now? And was this not the
case when you, Jason and Jessica reinstated the ia64 port of Debian?
I think we resurrected the port sometime around 2017 [1] while the last ia64 GCC maintainer resigned in 2019 [2]. So we had two more years with both the kernel and the toolchain being maintained. I didn't check when glibc maintenance
ceased though.
And yet in 2023 it's still usable (for gcc since 2019 w/o a maintainer
and for Linux since 2021 w/o a maintainer). Glibc lists Mike Frysinger
from Gentoo as maintainer for ia64 ([3]) - not sure if this is current information though.
[3]:
https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MAINTAINERS#Machine_maintainers
Similar for Linux, where there was no maintainer for ia64 since early
2021 IIRC.
As I have explained in a previous mail, ia64 is very special
Yes I didn't follow up on this one as I thought it might be a good idea
to work on other things (gcc, Linux, etc.), too, in between and yes,
that is the usual argument: "ia64 is very special". Though true for
sure, it for example seems to have been no problem for Linux in the time
frame from May to now according to my testing.
and therefore many
changes that can be implemented rather straight-forward on most other architectures
are more involved on ia64 which is why many upstream maintainers would rather see it
go.
Again for Linux, Linus had a different opinion back in February and also
backed that with information provided by `git log [...]`:
```
[...]
IOW, I'm more worried about "ia64 makes it a pain to make _generic_
changes".
IOW, doing something like this:
git log -p --no-merges --since=1.year arch/ia64/
to see what kind of pain ia64 parts of patches have caused, about a
third of them are that "look, somebody cared about ia64 explicitly".
And then the rest are trivial fixups for generic changes that aren't
any different from any other architecture. The only half-way
complicated one is the SET_FS removal, and I don't think it was any
worse than most other architectures.
IOW, it doesn't look like ia64 causes any huge issues _per_se_. I
suspect alpha continues to be more of a pain.
That said, it's entirely possible I've missed some particular painpoint.
But when it's actively known to be broken and nobody has time or
interest to look at it, at that point the "it doesn't look any more
painful than other architectures" becomes kind of moot.
```
...see [4].
[4]:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-ia64/CAHk-=wj9RkLN+GpYcFmsd8tze6zYL7MMkNpvdKbETQnqYm+Hwg@mail.gmail.com/
I don't know if his experience during fixing the security issue recently
really changed his opinion on this, but (1) it's also not broken
currently and (2) there are people interested to look after it now in
addition.
I do not have strong opinion on this myself, but I understand that the port causes
a particular burden for upstream maintainers and I can understand their reasoning.
If I interpret it correctly there seem to be two distinct groups of
upstream developers in this regard: the ones that have to work on ia64
as part of their work area and want it gone loudly and the ones that
just work on ia64 as part of their work area and keep going.
The people here (You for sure, Pedro, Dimitri, me and maybe Mike, too
and maybe others, too) and there (Tomas) would surely like to work with
both of them to keep ia64 going. Together we have the machines **and**
the expertise.
Cheers,
Frank
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2017/12/
[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commit;h=2ed6d245f7b79de73125edec51b2aa6db9ce3e6d
P.S.
New CCs, the thread started here:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2023/09/msg00010.html
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