ia64 removal (was: Re: lockref scalability on x86-64 vs cpu_relax)

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Ard!

On 1/14/23 00:25, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> Thanks for reporting back. I (mis)read the debian ports page [3],
> which mentions Debian 7 as the highest Debian version that supports
> IA64, and so I assumed that support had been dropped from Debian.

This page talks about officially supported ports. Debian Ports is an
unofficial spin maintained by a number of Debian Developers and external
developers that are volunteering to maintain these ports.

> However, if only a handful of people want to keep this port alive for
> reasons of nostalgia, it is obviously obsolete, and we should ask
> ourselves whether it is reasonable to expect Linux contributors to
> keep spending time on this.

You could say this about a lot of hardware, can't you?

> Does the Debian ia64 port have any users? Or is the system that builds
> the packages the only one that consumes them?

There is the popcon statistics. However, that is opt-on and the numbers are
not really trustworthy. We are getting feedback from time to time from people
using it.

Is there any problem with the ia64 port at the moment that would justify removal?

Adrian

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