On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 9:36 PM, Bernhard R. Link <[email protected]> wrote:
> * Jurij Smakov <[email protected]> [131005 12:38]: > > That's the theory. In reality, maintainers of large and complex software > > projects (like mozilla/firefox) do not really care about fringe > > architectures, and I don't see why this situation would improve with > time. > > Large and complex software has many bugs so maintainers will not care > for all of them equally. Having people care for them because the hit > them on their architecture causes them to be fixed before they come back > to bite everyone. > > > A pragmatic (but less conceptually-correct) approach would be to convince > > sparc kernel maintainers to introduce unaligned memory access handling > for > > userspace programs. > > For me that would make sparc totally uninteresting. Without the ability > to find bugs (which sparc was always very good at, even though alignment > was even stricter on hppa), sparc would just be another architecture > hardly worth supporting at all, especially as the hardware is no more > found as commonly as in former times and there is no longer that much a > difference in quality so that using has become more a liability than > a stability boost. > I really doubt that at this point sparc (well, Linux on sparc) is doing anyone a service by finding bugs. Vast majority of problems we saw in the past are unaligned access problems, which are not really bugs on other architectures - "fixing" them will probably not make the binary run faster on x86. So, when we find and file them, typically nobody cares. One spectacular example is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161826- it took over 7 *years* for this bug to be declared fixed. The fact that the current "iceweasel crashes on sparc" bug ( http://bugs.debian.org/674908) was open (with "grave" severity) for almost a year and was eventually tagged wheezy-ignore to prevent it from blocking the last release is an indication that Debian's release managers are adopting a similar attitude - and I don't blame them. Releasing Debian is a huge task, and expecting to delay the release because iceweasel is crashing for a few dozen people who bother running it on sparc is not reasonable. I don't want to discourage you (or anyone else), but I think that sparc as a Debian port is facing some serious problems, which can potentially lead to its demise in not-so-distant future, same way it happened to sparc32. Preventing binaries crashing on unaligned memory accesses would keep if afloat a bit longer (and you can make the behavior configurable, of course) - if I would still be a port maintainer, I would pursue this goal. > > Bernhard R. Link > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > [email protected] > Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] > > -- Jurij Smakov | [email protected] | Key IDs: 43C30A7D/C99E03CC
