Re: Architecture baseline for Forky

On Mon, 2025-10-27 at 09:55 +0100, Gerardo Ballabio wrote:
> If I understand correctly, the rationale for not supporting power8 is thi=
s:
>=20
> Bastian Blank wrote:
> > ## ppc64el
> > ```
> > % /usr/lib64/ld64.so.2 --help | sed -n '/^Subdirectories of glibc-hwcap=
s/,$p'
> > Subdirectories of glibc-hwcaps directories, in priority order:
> >   power10
> >   power9 (supported, searched)
> > ```
>=20
> I read that as meaning that power9 is supported by the current
> toolchain, while power8 is not. Please correct me if I am wrong.

POWER8 is still supported. The snippet above just documents what additional=
 targets
are supported through the hwcaps mechanism in glibc [1] which are POWER9 an=
d POWER10.

> So this isn't about "dropping" support for power8, it's about
> "restoring" it. As usual, Debian is a doocracy: we can do that if
> somebody commits to do that.

Nope, it's about dropping. POWER8 is still supported by the toolchain, kern=
el
and glibc. In fact, even much older POWER systems down to POWER5 and PowerP=
C 970
and even 32-bit PowerPC are still supported.

PS: I still think it's a bad idea to use the alias debian-ports@.

Adrian

> [1] https://sourceware.org/glibc/manual/latest/html_node/Hardware-Capabil=
ity-Tunables.html

--=20
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
`. `'   Physicist
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