On Thu, 11 May 2023 at 15:34, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
On Thu, 2023-05-11 at 14:17 +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On Thu, 11 May 2023 at 14:14, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 2023-05-11 at 14:06 +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > > Itanium IA-64 support is obsolete, and implements its own flavor of EFI
> > > boot that deviates from other architectures. Given that IA64 is unused
> > > and unmaintained, it makes no sense to pretend that the EFI changes we
> > > are making are tested or supported on IA64, so let's just get rid of it.
> >
> > But I just recently tested GRUB from git on IA64 and it worked without
> > any problems. We're using GRUB to boot Debian on IA64.
> >
>
> IA-64 is a dead platform, and a waste of electricity.
I was just making a statement regarding the testability of the code.
That's all.
Fair enough. That is good to know actually - that way, we have a known
working state right before we remove it.
> Feel free to keep using it, but please stop demanding that our people
> keep wasting their time on it. If you want to support it in Debian,
> you can carry it as a downstream patch and shoulder the maintenance
> burden.
Who is "our people"? Do you think that you are part of the community
and
I am not? I don't think this kind of hostility is justified. Neither
you
nor I own this project.
Apologies - I had meant to type 'other people' not 'our people'. I
rarely contribute to GRUB myself, so I wouldn't consider myself more a
part of this community than anyone else.
But my point remains: I have inferred from your response (and your
involvement in similar discussions around the Linux kernel) that you
would prefer Itanium support to be retained, right?
So could you explain who you think should carry the maintenance
burden? IA64 will be the only EFI architecture in GRUB that does not
boot via an EFI stub in Linux, and this deviation means that retaining
support for it is going to take actual developer and maintainer
bandwidth. GRUB gets very little of that as it is, which means that
keeping IA64 support alive comes at the cost of worse support for
other architectures and platforms. (The series that this patch is part
of breaks the ia64 build, and i i struggle to see why i should care
about that)
Very few of those people have access to such systems to begin with
(probably none), and the companies that manufactured them stopped
supporting them in the open source years ago, so testing these changes
is not straight-forward, making it unreasonable to demand this from
contributors. Also, it is unclear to me why the needs of the few
people that do still run such a system are not served by a build based
on today's GRUB tree, and why ia64 support needs to be retained going
forward.
I'll leave it to the maintainers whether to merge this patch or not,
but if this needs to keep working on ia64 as well, someone else will
have to step up.