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Date: Fri, 3 May 2024 10:19:52 -0700
From: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>
To: John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@kernel.org>, linux-alpha@vger.kernel.org,
	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
	Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>,
	Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>,
	Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>,
	Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
	Marc Zyngier <maz@kernel.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Michael Cree <mcree@orcon.net.nz>,
	Frank Scheiner <frank.scheiner@web.de>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/14] alpha: cleanups for 6.10
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Reply-To: paulmck@kernel.org
References: <20240503081125.67990-1-arnd@kernel.org>
 <272a909522f2790a30b9a8be73ab7145bf06d486.camel@physik.fu-berlin.de>
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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@kernel.org>

> > 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