Re: RVA22 or RVA23? Discussing RVA ISA Baselines in Debian
Hi Yunseong,
On Mon, 2025-07-14 at 11:14 +0200, Yunseong Kim wrote:
> This reminds me of the Debian transition to Power8 in the past, where some
> systems couldn't boot due to ISA-level incompatibilities—especially when
> optimized binaries required VSX instructions that older hardware didn't support.
I'm not aware that Debian made a transition to POWER8. The ppc64el port was
supported on POWER8 and above only right from the start. The baseline for the
big-endian ppc64 port is still PowerPC 970 without AltiVec support.
> In that context, I'm curious how Debian plans to approach baseline ISA support
> for RISC-V.
>
> Will Debian continue to target a broader baseline like RVA22 to retain
> compatibility with older hardware, even at the cost of some performance
> optimizations?
As long as there is a large userbase with RVA22 hardware, there should be no
transition to RVA23 in my opinion. However, it should be possible to use hwcaps
to enable additional features where supported.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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