Re: Question on BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT in GCC on NetBSD/m68k

[Administrator @ R·V·E <admin%r-v-e.co@localhost>]

Thanks for your great hard work and efforts to mantain the various and now considered exotic architectures running Debian, Adrian!


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-------- Original Message --------
On 12/06/2025 09:27, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz%physik.fu-berlin.de@localhost> wrote:

>  On Wed, 2025-06-11 at 20:16 -0700, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
>  > > Sorry, Adrian, but you can't have it both ways. Either you support small
>  > > systems or you don't. Debian's documentation says of m68k:
>  > >
>  > >     This architecture covers Amigas and ATARIs having a Motorola 680x0
>  > >     processor for x>=2; with MMU. However, the port is still active and
>  > >     available for installation even if not a part of this official stable
>  > >     release and might be reactivated for future releases.
>  > >
>  > > https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/compatibility.en.html#arches
>  > >
>  > > There is no mention of fast emulators. Yet that's all you're targeting
>  > > now.
>  >
>  > Fixing pthreads would probably go a long way. That's where we lost about half of our performance.
>  
>  This may be accurate, but I'm again not sure how this is related to the discussion we're having.
>  
>  Finn accuses me that I deliberately slow down Linux on m68k when all I do is continue to maintain
>  vanilla Debian on m68k. Modern versions of Linux being slower on slow m68k machines these days is
>  unfortunate, but it's not something I can be blamed for.
>  
>  My goal is to keep Debian's m68k alive and healthy and one critical change to make to make this whole
>  effort sustainable is to switch the default alignment to 4 bytes. If we want have a smaller and faster
>  Debian distribution available, that is still something that can be worked in a separate project and if
>  users are willing to help with such an effort, I'm happy to look into it