Re: RVA22 or RVA23? Discussing RVA ISA Baselines in Debian
Hello Adrian,
On 7/14/25 11:46 오전, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> 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.
Oh, thank you so much for pointing that out!
>> 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.
Understood, It’s indeed important to ensure proper support for the features in RVA23.
> Adrian
Thank you Adrian!
Best regards,
Yunseong
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