On 10/7/18 1:05 AM, Tobias Klausmann wrote:
>>
>> Alpha is a historic architecture at this point -- the last Alpha chip was the
>> EV7z which was released 14 years ago. I am wondering to what extent anyone
>> cares enough to worry about support for new glibc on old Alpha kernels at
>> this
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> point; I kind of suspect the number of Alpha Linux users can be counted on
>> two
>> hand's fingers.
>
> I'm the arch team lead for Alpha on Gentoo (team lead is sounding
> more grandiose than it is, my team is me and Matt Turner). Gentoo
> Linux is the last major distribution that still offers current
> alpha support, after Debian stopping to do so a few years back.
>
> It's hard to say how many alpha users there still are, but we
> still get bug reports and while #gentoo-alpha on Freenode is not
> a particularly busy place, we still get walk-in users with
> questions, usually about the the boot process and installing.
>
> Seeing as glibc is a central piece to Linux userspace, it ending
> support would probably mean that within a year or so, we (Gentoo
> Linux) stop supporting it for stable stuff, and thus security
> updates. Since that state would be unlikely to change in the
> future, we would probably make one last set of release
> files/media and then close up shop.
>
> How much bother is it to keep maintaining alpha as a supported
> target for glibc? Ultimately, it's a question if people want to
> put in the time. There will always be users as long as there is
> a supporting Linux distro, I guess.
>
The question is about if there is a reason to support a kernel/glibc version
mismatch.
-hpa
