Re: Architecture baseline for Forky

On Sun, 2025-10-26 at 20:12 +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Oct 26, Tony Rodriguez <[email protected]> wrote:
>=20
> > Why not support power 8 beyond 2028? It is still a good system and=20
> > supports newer little endian.
>=20
> Because that's 15 years and Debian's purpose is not to enable=20
> 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 cons=
idered
retro, then the original x86_64 hardware would be considered ancient, would=
n't it?

While POWER8 hardware reached EOL at IBM last year, I don't think this shou=
ld be
decisive criteria. You can also argue that quickly raising baselines will c=
ause
more e-waste.

> I think that waldi's proposal is quite reasonable.
>=20
> Next year probably we should also talk about RISC-V, when hopefully it=
=20
> 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 no=
t just be
pet projects of developers.

Adrian

PS: Please avoid posting to debian-ports@ as this address reaches ALL ports=
 mailing lists.

--=20
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   Physicist
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913