linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Retire IA64/Itanium support

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Date:   Wed, 15 Feb 2023 12:08:28 -0800
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@...el.com>
Cc:     John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@...sik.fu-berlin.de>,
        Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@...nel.org>,
        "linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>,
        Jessica Clarke <jrtc27@...c27.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Marc Zyngier <maz@...nel.org>,
        Guenter Roeck <linux@...ck-us.net>,
        "linux-ia64@...r.kernel.org" <linux-ia64@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Retire IA64/Itanium support

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 11:43 AM Luck, Tony <tony.luck@...el.com> wrote:
>
> Maybe you don't see others pain?  I added Al Viro ... perhaps
> he'll replay some of his thoughts from trying to make signals
> and other stuff work correctly on ia64.

Well, as long as it's ia64-specific, I'll just go "hey, it was Al's
choice to look at that code".

IOW, I'm more worried about "ia64 makes it a pain to make _generic_ changes".

IOW, doing something like this:

    git log -p --no-merges --since=1.year arch/ia64/

to see what kind of pain ia64 parts of patches have caused, about a
third of them are that "look, somebody cared about ia64 explicitly".

And then the rest are trivial fixups for generic changes that aren't
any different from any other architecture. The only half-way
complicated one is the SET_FS removal, and I don't think it was any
worse than most other architectures.

IOW, it doesn't look like ia64 causes any huge issues _per_se_. I
suspect alpha continues to be more of a pain.

That said, it's entirely possible I've missed some particular painpoint.

But when it's actively known to be broken and nobody has time or
interest to look at it, at that point the "it doesn't look any more
painful than other architectures" becomes kind of moot.

                  Linus