future of the libc6.1-alphaev67 package

Aurelien Jarno <[email protected]> Tue, 24 Aug 2021 22:59:32 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.ports.alpha
Message-ID	<YSVdtNV6KML/[email protected]>

Dear alpha porters,

With the removal of the libc6-xen package in glibc 2.32, the only
package still using the hwcap infrastructure is libc6.1-alphaev67.  The
hwcap infrastructure consists in upstream support for looking for
libraries in the hwcap directories, plus Debian specific patches to
support disabling hwcap with the /etc/ld.so.nohwcap, plus some mechanism
in the maintainer scripts to disable hwcap support until all libc6
packages are configured.

The various optimized packages have been replaced with time by other
mechanisms such as indirect function support (IFUNC), or runtime atomic
selection in GCC (-moutline-atomics).

I would therefore like to discuss the future of the libc6.1-alphaev67
package on alpha. According to popcon, to take with a grain of salt
given the low number of submissions, this package is installed on 20% of
the installations. I wonder if this package is really useful in terms of
performance, or if the architecture baseline can be raised to ev67, or
to a ev6 as a compromise. The goal is to stop building this package.

Regards,
Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
[email protected]                 http://www.aurel32.net

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