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https://lwn.net/Articles/1045363/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1045363/ > Rust, which has been cited as a cause for concern around ensuring continuing support for

by amiga386 11mo ago

https://lwn.net/Articles/1045363/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1045363/ > Rust, which has been cited as a cause for concern around ensuring continuing support for old architectures, supports 14 of the kernel's 20-ish architectures, the exceptions being Alpha, Nios II, OpenRISC, PARISC, and SuperH.

embedding-shape 11mo ago
> supports 14 of the kernel's 20-ish architectures That's a lot better than I expected to be honest, I was thinking maybe Rust supported 6-7 architectures in total, but seems Rust already has pretty wide support. If you start considering all tiers, the scope of support seems enormous: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm...
- chippiewill 11mo ago
  They probably get a few for "free" from LLVM supporting them
  - morkalork 11mo ago
    Wasn't that a whole tent pole of LLVM?
  - estebank 11mo ago
    LLVM platform support is neither sufficient (rustc needs to be taught about the platform) not technically necessary (you could write a rustc backend that targets a platform that LLVM doesn't, like modifying cranelift or once the gcc backend reaches maturity).
Lariscus 11mo ago
Its strange to me that Linux dropped Itanium two years ago but they decided to keep supporting Alpha and PA-RISC.
- Daishiman 11mo ago
  I do wonder how many humans beings are running the latest linux kernel on Alpha.
- ndiddy 11mo ago
  Itanium was mainly dropped because it was impeding work in the EFI subsystem. EFI was originally developed for Itanium before being ported to other platforms, so the EFI maintainers had to build and test their changes to shared code on Itanium. They eventually decided that this wasn't worth the effort when there was basically nobody running modern Linux on Itanium besides a few hobbyists. I imagine that alpha and hppa will get dropped in the future if they ever also create an undue maintenance burden. There's more context here if you're interested: https://lwn.net/Articles/950466/ https://lwn.net/Articles/950466/

embedding-shape 11mo ago

> supports 14 of the kernel's 20-ish architectures That's a lot better than I expected to be honest, I was thinking maybe Rust supported 6-7 architectures in total, but seems Rust already has pretty wide support. If you start considering all tiers, the scope of support seems enormous: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm...

chippiewill 11mo ago
They probably get a few for "free" from LLVM supporting them
- morkalork 11mo ago
  Wasn't that a whole tent pole of LLVM?
- estebank 11mo ago
  LLVM platform support is neither sufficient (rustc needs to be taught about the platform) not technically necessary (you could write a rustc backend that targets a platform that LLVM doesn't, like modifying cranelift or once the gcc backend reaches maturity).

Lariscus 11mo ago

Its strange to me that Linux dropped Itanium two years ago but they decided to keep supporting Alpha and PA-RISC.

Daishiman 11mo ago
I do wonder how many humans beings are running the latest linux kernel on Alpha.
ndiddy 11mo ago
Itanium was mainly dropped because it was impeding work in the EFI subsystem. EFI was originally developed for Itanium before being ported to other platforms, so the EFI maintainers had to build and test their changes to shared code on Itanium. They eventually decided that this wasn't worth the effort when there was basically nobody running modern Linux on Itanium besides a few hobbyists. I imagine that alpha and hppa will get dropped in the future if they ever also create an undue maintenance burden. There's more context here if you're interested: https://lwn.net/Articles/950466/ https://lwn.net/Articles/950466/