Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH 0/5] Add support for HPPA (PA-RISC)

[Thomas Petazzoni via buildroot <buildroot@buildroot.org>]

Hello Vincent,

On Fri, 23 May 2025 19:43:08 +0200
Vincent Stehlé via buildroot <buildroot@buildroot.org> wrote:

> This patch series adds minimal support for a "new" architecture: HP/PA
> (a.k.a. PA-RISC); one of the RISC architectures of the late 80ies.
> 
> This architecture is still well supported by gcc, Linux and some other
> distros; therefore it should not be too much of a burden to support in
> Buildroot.
> 
> With those patches we have enough to build and run a Linux kernel with
> busybox on Qemu, which makes it easily testable. 
> 
> I plan to add support later on for running on actual hardware; the HP
> 9000 712 PA-RISC Workstation.

I have nothing against HPPA, but is this going to be used in practice?
We already support quite a lot of "exotic" architectures in Buildroot,
and they are a fairly heavy maintenance burden, due to:

- Architecture dependencies in several core packages. For example,
  libffi, libcap, are used by zillions of packages and they have
  architecture dependencies.

- GCC issues. Our autobuilders are flooded by GCC issues affecting
  SuperH, Microblaze and other exotic architectures, and those issues
  are never fixed because nobody cares.

So while I find it nice that we support so many architectures, I think
we should all wonder whether it makes sense to support even more and
for what use-case.

Thanks for your feedback!

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, co-owner and CEO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering and training
https://bootlin.com
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