Re: future of the libc6.1-alphaev67 package

[Michael Cree <mcree@orcon.net.nz>]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 10:59:32PM +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> I would therefore like to discuss the future of the libc6.1-alphaev67
> package on alpha. According to popcon, to take with a grain of salt
> given the low number of submissions, this package is installed on 20% of
> the installations. I wonder if this package is really useful in terms of
> performance, or if the architecture baseline can be raised to ev67, or
> to a ev6 as a compromise. The goal is to stop building this package.

I think we should raise the baseline to include the byte-word
extension (BWX) which I think would be EV56.  In addition to
giving some optimisations generally to libc it would eliminate
a class of unaligned access bugs across the archive where gcc
performs an optimisation based on a flawed determination that
certain alignment exists in the memory access of a byte or
16-bit word.

Cheers,
Michael.