Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Retire IA64/Itanium support

[Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org>]

Hi Linus,

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 12:08:28PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 11:43 AM Luck, Tony <tony.luck@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > Maybe you don't see others pain?  I added Al Viro ... perhaps
> > he'll replay some of his thoughts from trying to make signals
> > and other stuff work correctly on ia64.
> 
> Well, as long as it's ia64-specific, I'll just go "hey, it was Al's
> choice to look at that code".
> 
> IOW, I'm more worried about "ia64 makes it a pain to make _generic_ changes".
> 
> IOW, doing something like this:
> 
>     git log -p --no-merges --since=1.year arch/ia64/
> 
> to see what kind of pain ia64 parts of patches have caused, about a
> third of them are that "look, somebody cared about ia64 explicitly".
 
I remember that when I was doing cleanups of mm initialization, ia64
required special care several times.

> That said, it's entirely possible I've missed some particular painpoint.

The largest painpoint IMO is absence of any ability to test ia64 except
sending patches to Adrian in a hope he has time to give them a whirl.
 
>                   Linus

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Mike.