Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 12:02 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Probably. Independent of that, it's fair to ask why we're still
>> testing against xlc 12.1 and not the considerably-more-recent xlclang,
>> or at least xlc 16.1. (I also wonder why we're still testing AIX 7.1
>> rather than an OS version that's not EOL.)
> Well, according to Wikipedia, AIX 7.3 (released in 2021) requires
> POWER8. AIX 7.2 (released 2015) only requires POWER7, and according to
> the buildfarm page, this machine is POWER7. So it could possibly be
> upgraded from 7.1 to 7.2, supposing that it is indeed compatible with
> that release and that Noah's willing to do it and that there's not an
> exorbitant fee and so on, but that still leaves you running an OS
> version that is almost certainly closer to EOL than it is to the
> original release date. Anything newer would require buying new
> hardware, or so I guess.
The machine belongs to OSU (via the gcc compile farm), and I see
that they have another one that's POWER8 and is running AIX 7.3 [1].
So in principle the buildfarm animals could just be moved over
to that one.
Perhaps Noah has some particular attachment to 7.1, but now that that's
EOL it seems like we shouldn't be paying so much attention to it.
My guess is that it's still there in the compile farm because the gcc
people think it's still useful to have access to POWER7 hardware; but
I doubt there's enough difference for our purposes to be worth dealing
with a dead OS and ancient compiler.
regards, tom lane
[1] https://portal.cfarm.net/machines/list/