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

[Roland Dreier]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Paul E. McKenney
<paulmck at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> 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().

Yes, Alpha is a pretty interesting case, since as I understand things
the Alpha memory ordering model requires us to do things that no
other arch requires.  So it affects the whole kernel in a pretty
expensive way: it adds complexity to an already complex area of
the kernel.

IOW, how much of a win would dropping arch/alpha be?  Would
the cleanups be too scary, because no one knows what is really
only required by alpha and what is genuinely used by another
weakly ordered arch?

 - R.