[parisc-linux] State of official Linux kernel

[Jurriaan on Alpha]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 07:40:28PM +0000, Markus Grabert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm just curious what the state of the PA-RISC support of the
> official linux kernel is (2.4.14 from kernel.org).
> 
> IMHO I assume that the latest Linux/PA-RISC progress didn't and won't
> make it in the official linux kernel tree (at least not soon), am I right ?
> (I don't see any hppa changes in the kernel-Changelogs at all)

Not while there are multiple changes per day - anyone with a parisc
machine tracks the parisc-kernel anyway, so what would be the point?

> 
> Probably due to the fact that Linux/PA-RISC is still somewhat
> experimental and probably some design issues are not fixed yet.
> Are there any plans to integrate the lastest stuff into the
> linux main tree (soon) ?

I gather there's more use in fixing bugs than merging. Also see above.

> 
> What about gcc, gdb, glibc and binutils ? How long do you think does it
> take to get the current fixes/patches into a release ?

There's some tough bugs at the moment, and I hope that after those are
squashed our hard-working developers will have the time to concentrate
on the kernel, with a relatively stable parisc development userland.

> 
> AFAIK RedHat/Cygnus supports/maintains gcc, gdb, glibc and binutils.
> Are there (usually) any problems to get the patches/fixes (of gcc, gdb,
> ...) into a official release ? How good is the cooperation with the main
> developers of these tools/libraries ? RedHat doesn't seem to be interested
> in an Linux/PA-RISC port and debian is something like a competitor ...
> 
You can't be serious. Debian/parisc is no competitior of RedHat. I
assume there would be no problem getting fixes in if they are the right
fixes. At this moment, I haven't seen a clear email saying: 'all bugs in
the development tools have been found, go forth and apt-get update!'.

Good luck,
Jurriaan
-- 
IBM: I'm Beyond Mistakes
GNU/Linux 2.4.15-pre6 on Debian/Alpha 64-bits 988 bogomips load:0.15 0.53 0.61