Re: removing old ports and architectures

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 5:46 PM, Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> I think we should remove support the following ports:
> - IRIX
> - UnixWare
> - Tru64
>
> Neither of those are relevant.

Seems reasonable.

> I think we should remove support for the following architectures:
> - VAX

Agreed.

> - univel (s_lock support remaining)
> - sinix (s_lock support remaining)
> - sun3 (I think it's just s_lock support remaining)
> - natsemi 32k

I don't know enough about these, which doesn't bode well for them.

> - superH

SuperH isn't dead, but it is only used for very small embedded
systems, I think (mostly microcontrollers). So maybe.

> - ALPHA (big pain in the ass to get right, nobody uses it anymore)

Yes, for many years now ALPHA has only been useful as a way of
illustrating how bad it's possible for CPU memory operation reordering
considerations to get. So I quite agree.

> - m86k (doesn't have a useable CAS on later iterations like coldfire)

It does seem like Motorola 68k is vanishingly close to dead.

> - M32R (no userspace CAS afaics)
> - mips for anything but gcc > 4.4, using gcc's atomics support
> - s390 for anything but gcc > 4.4, using gcc's atomics support
> - 32bit/<v9 sparc (doesn't have proper atomics, old)

Not so sure about these.

> Possibly:
> - all mips
> - PA-RISC. I think Tom was the remaining user there? Maybe just !gcc.

I think we should think hard about removing support for MIPS. A lot of
Chinese chip manufacturers have licensed MIPS technology in just the
last couple of years, so there is plenty of it out there; I'd be
slightly concerned that the proposed restrictions on MIPS would be
onerous. Much of this is the kind of hardware that a person might
plausibly want to run Postgres on.

--
Peter Geoghegan