Horton

Re: AIX support - alignment issues

Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>

View thread View on postgr.es
From: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2022-07-02T18:54:16Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Sat, Jul 2, 2022 at 11:34 AM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> Personally I think we should just drop AIX. The amount of effort to keep it
> working is substantial due to being quite different from other unices ([2]), the is
> very outdated, the whole ecosystem is barely on lifesupport ([3]). And all of that
> for very little real world use.

I tend to agree about dropping AIX. But I wonder if there is an
argument against that proposal that doesn't rely on AIX being relevant
to at least one user. Has supporting AIX ever led to the discovery of
a bug that didn't just affect AIX? In other words, are AIX systems
peculiar in some particular way that clearly makes them more likely to
flush out a certain class of bugs? What is the best argument *against*
desupporting AIX that you know of?

Desupporting AIX doesn't mean that any AIX users will be left in the
lurch immediately. Obviously these users will be able to use a
supported version of Postgres for several more years.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan

Commits

  1. Doc: Acknowledge historically supported CPUs and OSes.

  2. Further tidy-up for old CPU architectures.

  3. Tidy up claimed supported CPUs and OSes.

  4. Remove HP/Intel Itanium support.

  5. Remove HP-UX port.

  6. Reorder subskiplsn in pg_subscription to avoid alignment issues.

  7. Tighten TAP tests' tracking of postmaster state some more.

  8. Reorder pg_sequence columns to avoid alignment issue