Re: [PATCH 00/14] alpha: cleanups for 6.10

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Fri, 3 May 2024, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

> > I had investigated dropping support for alpha EV5 and earlier a while
> > ago after noticing that this is the only supported CPU family
> > in the kernel without native byte access and that Debian has already
> > dropped support for this generation last year [1] after it turned
> > out to be broken.
> 
> That's not quite correct. Support for older Alphas is not broken and
> always worked when I tested it. It's just that some people wanted to
> raise the baseline in order to improve code performance on newer machines
> with the hope to fix some minor issues we saw on Alpha here and there.

 I'm not quite happy to see pre-EV5 support go as EV45 is all the Alpha 
hardware I have and it's only owing to issues with the firmware of my 
console manager hardware that I haven't deployed it at my lab yet for 
Linux and GNU toolchain verification.  I'd rather I wasn't stuck with an 
obsolete version of Linux.

> > This topic came up again when Paul E. McKenney noticed that
> > parts of the RCU code already rely on byte access and do not
> > work on alpha EV5 reliably, so I refreshed my series now for
> > inclusion into the next merge window.
> 
> Hrrrm? That sounds like like Paul ran tests on EV5, did he?

 What exactly is required to make it work?

  Maciej