On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 5:53 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Hmph ... three of my five buildfarm animals are 32-bit, plus I
> have got 32-bit OSes for my Raspberry Pi ;-). Admittedly, none
> of those represent hardware someone would put a serious database
> on today. But in terms of testing diversity, I think they're
> a lot more credible than thirty-one flavors of Linux on x86_64.
Fair enough.
To be clear I meant testing in the deepest and most general sense --
not simply running the tests. If you happen to be using approximately
the same platform as most Postgres hackers, it's reasonable to expect
to run into fewer bugs tied to portability issues. Regardless of
whether or not the minority platform you were considering has
theoretical testing parity.
Broad trends have made it easier to write portable C code, but that
doesn't apply to 32-bit machines, I imagine. Including even the
extremely low power 32-bit chips that are not yet fully obsolete, like
the Raspberry Pi Zero's chip.
--
Peter Geoghegan