Hi, On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:18:38AM +0200, Sicelo wrote: > On Mon, Oct 27, 2025 at 11:52:00PM +0000, John Klos wrote: > > What is the purpose of this? Is it to, perhaps, reduce work? If so, what > > work would that be, specifically?
yes - maintaining all special cases is an effort. > > Is it to give better performance because of greater compiler optimization > > potential? If so, has anyone done tests that show the advantages of such > > optimizations? If I recall correctly, at least for amd64, optimizing for > > newer "v" levels didn't offer measurably meaningful advantages. [1] yes, but your mileage may vary: You often have a special case where general performance measuerement didb't catch the use case. > > Is it to reduce the load on some people or some group or groups of people > > who'd otherwise need to maintain code supporting older architecture > > variants? If so, who are these people / groups, and what work would be > > saved? yes - that are all people involde in debian or generally in Open Source. > > Is it a desire for cleanliness, and removing older targets makes things more > > clean? yes, throwing out old clumsy code with special workaround for old hardware flaws is a great cleanup. > > In other words, what're the real world advantages to these changes, and have > > they been measured and shown to outweigh the real world disadvantages? If > > so, where can we find those evaluations? See above. Measurement I don't know. > * is there something that the rest of us can do to help? Eg. do measurements and evaluations on that. > I am particularly interested in keeping armhf (Cortex-A8 specifically) > supported, Me too as this architecture is still sold as SoC boards with an excellent feature to price ratio. Especially for low power environments. Of course this platforms have licens/errata etc. issues, but OpenHardware like RISCV is not common enough yet. > and while it is not much, I have been contributing to the > linux kernel in connection with these machines, and I am looking for > ways to contribute more in Debian too. See above. Thanks alot to everbody keeping the debian ecosystem running! Greetings Hermann
