Hi,
On 2023-10-19 17:23:04 -0700, Noah Misch wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 11:16:28AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > We removed support for the HP-UX OS in v16, but left in support
> > for the PA-RISC architecture, mainly because I thought that its
> > spinlock mechanism is weird enough to be a good stress test
> > for our spinlock infrastructure. It still is that, but my
> > one remaining HPPA machine has gone to the great recycle heap
> > in the sky. There seems little point in keeping around nominal
> > support for an architecture that we can't test and no one is
> > using anymore.
> >
> > Hence, the attached removes the remaining support for HPPA.
> > Any objections?
>
> I wouldn't do this. NetBSD/hppa still claims to exist, as does the OpenBSD
> equivalent. I presume its pkgsrc compiles this code. The code is basically
> zero-maintenance, so there's not much to gain from deleting it preemptively.
In addition to the point Tom has made, I think it's also not correct that hppa
doesn't impose a burden: hppa is the only of our architectures that doesn't
actually support atomic operations, requiring us to have infrastructure to
backfill atomics using spinlocks. This does preclude some uses of atomics,
e.g. in signal handlers - I think Thomas wanted to do so for some concurrency
primitive.
Greetings,
Andres Freund