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.
Put otherwise, I think the reason we're testing on this AIX rather
than anything else is probably that there is exactly 1 person
associated with the project who has >0 pieces of hardware that can run
AIX, and that person has one, so we're testing on that one. That might
be a reason to question whether that particular strain of hardware has
a bright future, at least in terms of PostgreSQL support.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com