Re: Atomics hardware support table & supported architectures

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 07:51:32PM +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2014-06-27 13:12:31 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> > I don't personally object to dropping Alpha, but when this was
> > discussed back in October, Stefan did:
> > 
> > http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/52616373.10004@kaltenbrunner.cc
> 
> Ah, right. I still am in favor of dropping it because I don't it is
> likely to work, but, as a compromise, we could remove only the Tru64
> variant? Openbsd + gcc is much less of a hassle.

Retaining Alpha support means placing data dependency barriers (Linux kernel
term) where the Alpha memory model requires them.  I doubt enough users will
stress Alpha builds for us to distinguish a missing barrier from hardware
flakiness, so we'd never find out whether we did it right.  That's why I favor
removing Alpha-specific code completely, and it is an OS-independent and
compiler-independent motive.

-- 
Noah Misch
EnterpriseDB                                 http://www.enterprisedb.com