Linus Torvalds wrote: > Don't worry about pa-risc. There may be a handful of users, where even > "users" is more of a "boot up occasionally just for perverse fun" > rather than anything else.
Yes, I'm quite aware that, like alpha and ia64, it's purely of historical interest. It's not even in the second tier of chips that are still being bought to get real work done, like MIPS (a lot of consumer routers!) and SPARC. (Offended Itanium fanbois, please go back to sleep until Kittson is atually for sale.) But it's an interesting architecture (in the same sense that a platypus is an "interesting animal"), the maintainers are happy to test patches, and I presume I'm permitted to amuse muself messing with it as long as it doesn't cause problems for the non-Jamaican bobsled teams. (Note that PA-RISC does't support unaligned loads, so it doesn't use the word-at-a-time code path at all.)
