[PATCH] NEWS: Deprecate ia64-linux-gnu

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

(CC'ing two of the Gentoo guys)

Hi!

On 1/29/21 5:51 PM, Adhemerval Zanella wrote:
> On 29/01/2021 13:37, Florian Weimer via Libc-alpha wrote:
>> This reflects to the orpahned status of the ia64 architecture in the
>> Linux kernel as of commit 96ec72a3425d1515b69b7f9dc34a4a6ce5862a37
>> ("ia64: Mark architecture as orphaned").
> 
> I am not sure about this, the deprecation issue was also raised on gcc
> maillist and Jason step up to be the ia64 maintainer [1].  I also see
> that binutils does fix some ia64 issues from time to time.

FWIW, the SH port of the Linux kernel was orphaned for a while as well until
it found two new maintainers. So being orphaned in the kernel doesn't
necessarily mean that a port is slated for removal.

> The Debian community still has working ia64 buildbots, which they
> gave access to test the latest releases. They can comment better their
> idea of the ia64-linux-gnu port.

Speaking for Debian, we're maintaining the port as good as possible but it's
not in the best shape. glibc has many testsuite failures, ia64 support was
removed with Ruby 2.7 and the ia64 backend gcc doesn't have a maintainer
either.

The Linux kernel for ia64 has issues on larger ia64 NUMA machines and doesn't
boot there, smaller ia64 machines have issues with the hpsa driver currently
which have been reported and the problematic commit been located, but the
issue has not been resolved yet.

So, if we want to continue to maintain the port, someone would at least need
to fix the kernel issues.

> My take is once Linux is gone we are free to deprecate without a
> warning.

I agree. But I'm interested to hear the voices from the Gentoo side.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913