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Message-ID: <b4adb884e4c1014ecce7d1857adb7feb48ba837f.camel@physik.fu-berlin.de>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] alpha: cleanups and build fixes for 6.10
From: John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>
To: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>, Linus Torvalds
	 <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Ulrich Teichert <krypton@ulrich-teichert.org>, 
 debian-alpha@lists.debian.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Linux-Arch
 <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>, linux-alpha@vger.kernel.org, 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>, "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2024 08:17:28 +0200
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References: <71feb004-82ef-4c7b-9e21-0264607e4b20@app.fastmail.com>
	 <e383dfe5-814a-4a87-befc-4831a7788f42@app.fastmail.com>
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Hi Ulrich,

On Fri, 2024-05-10 at 23:19 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> The following changes since commit fec50db7033ea478773b159e0e2efb135270e3=
b7:
>=20
>   Linux 6.9-rc3 (2024-04-07 13:22:46 -0700)
>=20
> are available in the Git repository at:
>=20
>   https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/arnd/asm-generic.git ta=
gs/asm-generic-alpha
>=20
> for you to fetch changes up to a4184174be36369c3af8d937e165f28a43ef1e02:
>=20
>   alpha: drop pre-EV56 support (2024-05-06 12:05:00 +0200)
>=20
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> alpha: cleanups and build fixes
>=20
> 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] in order to
> improve performance for the newer machines.
>=20
> 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 we decided on using my series to
> avoid the problem entirely.
>=20
> 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 and allow
> backporting the fixes to stable kernels for the now removed hardware
> support as well.
>=20
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Al Viro (9):
>       alpha: sort scr_mem{cpy,move}w() out
>       alpha: fix modversions for strcpy() et.al.
>       alpha: add clone3() support
>       alpha: don't make functions public without a reason
>       alpha: sys_sio: fix misspelled ifdefs
>       alpha: missing includes
>       alpha: core_lca: take the unused functions out
>       alpha: jensen, t2 - make __EXTERN_INLINE same as for the rest
>       alpha: trim the unused stuff from asm-offsets.c
>=20
> Arnd Bergmann (5):
>       alpha: remove DECpc AXP150 (Jensen) support
>       alpha: sable: remove early machine support
>       alpha: remove LCA and APECS based machines
>       alpha: cabriolet: remove EV5 CPU support
>       alpha: drop pre-EV56 support

There are currently efforts to remove kernel support for older Alpha machin=
es
before EV56 such as the Jensen machines and I was wondering what the curren=
t
status of the Linux kernel on your machine was.

Arnd and Paul claim it's broken and no longer works, but not too long ago y=
ou
confirmed that Linux 5.14 booted fine on your machine.

Do you have any current data?

Thanks,
Adrian

--=20
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   Physicist
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913