Re: Architecture baseline for Forky
On Sun, 2025-10-26 at 20:12 +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Oct 26, Tony Rodriguez <unixpro1970@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Why not support power 8 beyond 2028? It is still a good system and
> > supports newer little endian.
>
> Because that's 15 years and Debian's purpose is not to enable
> retrocomputing projects.
I don't think that POWER8 would be considered retrocomputing given the fact
that it's just three years older than POWER9. The first x86_64 CPUs were
released in 2003 and are still supported by Debian.
If hardware released between 2014 and 2022 (last POWER8 server sold is considered
retro, then the original x86_64 hardware would be considered ancient, wouldn't it?
While POWER8 hardware reached EOL at IBM last year, I don't think this should be
decisive criteria. You can also argue that quickly raising baselines will cause
more e-waste.
> I think that waldi's proposal is quite reasonable.
>
> Next year probably we should also talk about RISC-V, when hopefully it
> will be more clear what hardware will be available.
Well, Ubuntu raised the baseline to RV23 before there was even any hardware available
meaning that their upcoming RISC-V releases will run on QEMU only. I don't think that
was a very clever move. In the end, software should support use case and not just be
pet projects of developers.
Adrian
PS: Please avoid posting to debian-ports@ as this address reaches ALL ports mailing lists.
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
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