Re: Question on BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT in GCC on NetBSD/m68k

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

On Wed, 2025-06-11 at 20:16 -0700, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> > Sorry, Adrian, but you can't have it both ways. Either you support small 
> > systems or you don't. Debian's documentation says of m68k:
> > 
> >     This architecture covers Amigas and ATARIs having a Motorola 680x0 
> >     processor for x>=2; with MMU. However, the port is still active and 
> >     available for installation even if not a part of this official stable 
> >     release and might be reactivated for future releases.
> > 
> > https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/compatibility.en.html#arches
> > 
> > There is no mention of fast emulators. Yet that's all you're targeting 
> > now.
> 
> Fixing pthreads would probably go a long way. That's where we lost about half of our performance.

This may be accurate, but I'm again not sure how this is related to the discussion we're having.

Finn accuses me that I deliberately slow down Linux on m68k when all I do is continue to maintain
vanilla Debian on m68k. Modern versions of Linux being slower on slow m68k machines these days is
unfortunate, but it's not something I can be blamed for.

My goal is to keep Debian's m68k alive and healthy and one critical change to make to make this whole
effort sustainable is to switch the default alignment to 4 bytes. If we want have a smaller and faster
Debian distribution available, that is still something that can be worked in a separate project and if
users are willing to help with such an effort, I'm happy to look into it.

However, what I don't like is that multiple people in this thread dismiss my work completely with
questionable arguments and unrealistic counter-proposals when they have no clue how distributions
are maintained and how tedious it is to spin your own distribution.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
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`. `'   Physicist
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