[Ksummit-2012-discuss] [ATTEND] <ding> "Bring out your dead" <ding>...

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Tuesday 26 June 2012, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> I suggested dropping Alpha awhile back and got this URL in response:
> 
>         http://www.alphalinux.org/wiki/index.php/User:Armin76/HW_list
> 
> That said, I believe that Alpha-only bugs are accumulating, as there
> are situations where only Alpha needs something like rcu_dereference()
> and all other architectures are happy with ACCESS_ONCE().

The bigger question is how many of those machines will ever get updated
to new kernels. If the list says that Fedora 9 is installed, it might
not actually work any more (it should of course, but it's been quite
a while since that release was new, so who knows).

Maybe it's time to start a linux-legacy kernel project and move stuff
in there that we are no longer interested in having in the regular
kernel. I don't think we should be doing this as long as the maintainer
is reasonably active and prefers to have the code upstream, but if either
there is no maintainer or the maintainer prefers to have his code in the
legacy tree, we could have a fast-path out.

	Arnd