Re: AIX support - alignment issues

Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Sun, Jul 3, 2022 at 8:34 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> I am a little concerned though that we don't have access to the latest
>> version of AIX --- that seems like a non-maintainable situation.

> The release history doesn't look toooo bad on that front: the live
> versions are 7.1 (2010-2023), 7.2 (2015-TBA) and 7.3 (2021-TBA). 7.3
> only came out half a year ago, slightly after Windows 11, which we
> aren't testing yet either. Those GCC AIX systems seem to be provided
> by IBM and the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University which has a
> POWER lab providing ongoing CI services etc to various OSS projects,
> so I would assume that upgrades (and retirement of the
> about-to-be-desupported 7.1 system) will come along eventually.

OK, we can wait awhile to see what happens on that.

> I don't have a dog in this race, but AIX is clearly not in the same
> category as HP-UX (and maybe Solaris is somewhere in between). AIX
> runs on hardware you can buy today that got a major refresh last year
> (Power 10), while HP-UX runs only on discontinued CPUs, so while it's
> a no-brainer to drop HP-UX support, it's a trickier question for AIX.

Yeah. FTR, I'm out of the HP-UX game: due to a hardware failure,
I can no longer boot that installation. I would have preferred to
keep pademelon, with its pre-C99 compiler, going until v11 is EOL,
but that ain't happening. I see that EDB are still running a couple
of HP-UX/IA64 animals, but I wonder if they're prepared to do anything
to support those animals --- like, say, fix platform-specific bugs.
Robert has definitely indicated displeasure with doing so, but
I don't know if he makes the decisions on that.

I would not stand in the way of dropping HP-UX and IA64 support as of
v16. (I do still feel that HPPA is of interest, to keep us honest
about spinlock support --- but that dual-stack arrangement that IA64
uses is surely not part of anyone's future.)

I have no opinion either way about Solaris.

regards, tom lane