On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 8:04 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Ants Aasma <ants@cybertec.at> wrote:
>> FWIW, I think that if we approach coding lock free algorithms
>> correctly - i.e. "which memory barriers can we avoid while being
>> safe", instead of "which memory barriers we need to add to become
>> safe" - then supporting Alpha isn't a huge amount of extra work.
>
> Alpha is completely irrelevant, so I would not like to expend the
> tiniest effort on supporting it. If there is someone using a very much
> legacy architecture like this, I doubt that even they will appreciate
> the ability to upgrade to the latest major version.
It's mostly irrelevant and I wouldn't shed a tear for Alpha support,
but I'd like to point out that it's a whole lot less irrelevant than
some of the architectures being discussed here. The latest Alpha
machines were sold only 6 years ago and supported up to 512GB of
memory with 64 1.3 GHz cores, something that can run a very reasonable
database load even today.
Regards,
Ants Aasma