Re: [GIT PULL] alpha: cleanups and build fixes for 6.10

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hi Ulrich,

On Fri, 2024-05-10 at 23:19 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> The following changes since commit fec50db7033ea478773b159e0e2efb135270e3b7:
> 
>   Linux 6.9-rc3 (2024-04-07 13:22:46 -0700)
> 
> are available in the Git repository at:
> 
>   https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/arnd/asm-generic.git tags/asm-generic-alpha
> 
> for you to fetch changes up to a4184174be36369c3af8d937e165f28a43ef1e02:
> 
>   alpha: drop pre-EV56 support (2024-05-06 12:05:00 +0200)
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> alpha: cleanups and build fixes
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> 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
> 
> 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 machines
before EV56 such as the Jensen machines and I was wondering what the current
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 you
confirmed that Linux 5.14 booted fine on your machine.

Do you have any current data?

Thanks,
Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   Physicist
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