Hi Maciej, On Fri, 2025-05-02 at 17:27 +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > I only have non-BWX hardware and I'm not interested in decommissioning it > or upgrading. There appear to be a few users around, but I seem to be the > last GCC developer remaining who is willing to do anything about the port. > It doesn't help that Alpha/QEMU appears broken and produces unreliable > results, so it'd have to be someone with actual hardware (or willing to > fix QEMU first).
What exactly is broken with the QEMU emulation in Alpha? I don't know of any bugs, but it could be that you have run into the nasty stack alignment issue in the kernel that was fixed in Linux 6.14. So, if you test on an emulated Alpha, please make sure to use at least kernel 6.14 and also make sure that CONFIG_COMPACTION is disabled. Using this setup will get you a very reliable and stable Alpha Linux environment on QEMU. > > What I was not aware of is the situation with the Alpha backend and the > need to put out fires there. That non-BWX issue with Linux kernel's RCU > algorithms was a nasty surprise to me, one I could have dealt with before > with less time pressure if I knew about it. What RCU issue are you talking about? I can only stress that to use Linux on Alpha, you *must* use kernel 6.14 or later with CONFIG_COMPACTION disabled otherwise you will run into all kinds of issues. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
