Re: 9.4 broken on alpha

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> I think we've probably beat this to death. Nobody here believes that
> it's sane to try to support Alpha without access to hardware, and no
> offer of hardware has been forthcoming. If one were to materialize,
> we could usefully have a debate about whether it's worth doing ...

I agree. I can't believe how seriously Alpha support has been debated
here. I think that the Linux implementation is simply very limited, or
broken.

Andres mentioned Linux supporting systems without MMUs/paging. I
imagine this was based on this paragraph in the Linux README:

Linux is easily portable to most general-purpose 32- or 64-bit architectures
as long as they have a paged memory management unit (PMMU) and a port of the
GNU C compiler (gcc) (part of The GNU Compiler Collection, GCC). Linux has
also been ported to a number of architectures without a PMMU, although
functionality is then obviously somewhat limited.

I'm not sure how or to what degree these systems lacking an MMU have
limited support, but I think it's fair to speculate that Alpha may
similarly have severe limitations, or even severe bugs (just like
Postgres 9.4's Alpha support).

--
Peter Geoghegan