Re: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky
Hi,
On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:18:38AM +0200, Sicelo wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 27, 2025 at 11:52:00PM +0000, John Klos wrote:
> > What is the purpose of this? Is it to, perhaps, reduce work? If so, what
> > work would that be, specifically?
yes - maintaining all special cases is an effort.
> > Is it to give better performance because of greater compiler optimization
> > potential? If so, has anyone done tests that show the advantages of such
> > optimizations? If I recall correctly, at least for amd64, optimizing for
> > newer "v" levels didn't offer measurably meaningful advantages. [1]
yes, but your mileage may vary: You often have a special case where general
performance measuerement didb't catch the use case.
> > Is it to reduce the load on some people or some group or groups of people
> > who'd otherwise need to maintain code supporting older architecture
> > variants? If so, who are these people / groups, and what work would be
> > saved?
yes - that are all people involde in debian or generally in Open Source.
> > Is it a desire for cleanliness, and removing older targets makes things more
> > clean?
yes, throwing out old clumsy code with special workaround for old hardware flaws
is a great cleanup.
> > In other words, what're the real world advantages to these changes, and have
> > they been measured and shown to outweigh the real world disadvantages? If
> > so, where can we find those evaluations?
See above. Measurement I don't know.
> * is there something that the rest of us can do to help?
Eg. do measurements and evaluations on that.
> I am particularly interested in keeping armhf (Cortex-A8 specifically)
> supported,
Me too as this architecture is still sold as SoC boards with an excellent feature to
price ratio. Especially for low power environments.
Of course this platforms have licens/errata etc. issues, but OpenHardware like
RISCV is not common enough yet.
> and while it is not much, I have been contributing to the
> linux kernel in connection with these machines, and I am looking for
> ways to contribute more in Debian too.
See above.
Thanks alot to everbody keeping the debian ecosystem running!
Greetings
Hermann
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