Re: removing old ports and architectures

On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 12:22 AM, Noah Misch <noah(at)leadboat(dot)com> wrote:
> Removing support for alpha is a different animal compared to removing support
> for non-gcc MIPS and most of the others in your list. A hacker wishing to
> restore support for another MIPS compiler would fill in the assembly code
> blanks, probably using code right out of an architecture manual. A hacker
> wishing to restore support for alpha would find himself auditing every
> lock-impoverished algorithm in the backend.

I had much the same thought last night. So I reverse my vote on
Alpha: let's drop it. I had thought that perhaps there'd be some
value in keeping it to force ourselves to consider what will happen
under the weakest generally-understood memory model, but in fact
that's probably a doomed effort without having the hardware available
to test the code. As you say, any future atomics support for such a
platform will be a major undertaking.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company