On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.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 -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
