Linux 5.15 is now a little less broken for the DEC Alpha “Jensen”

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One has to wonder how long the Linux kernel will keep very old and known to be bored hardware support, but at least for now, support for the DECpc AXP 150 “Jensen” platform persists and with Linux 5.15 does. is more marked as “broken” altogether.

For the past four years, the Kconfig Linux kernel for the DEC platform Alpha Jensen marked it as “BROKEN” because it was known to not even compile due to a build error … With Linux 5.15 , the Jensen system code now has its four lines of code moved so that it can at least build correctly. So, with a merged change on Saturday, Linux 5.15 no longer calls Jensen as “BROKEN”.

But the code is still probably broken / unable to run on real hardware. Linus Torvalds conceded the change, “Ok it is almost certainly still broken on real hardware, but the immediate reason it was marked BROKEN was a build error which is fixed by just making sure the low level IO header file is included early enough for the __EXTERN_INLINE hack to take effect …. There are a lot of alpha setups that don’t build cleanly, but now that’s not because Jensen wouldn’t be buildable.

See this commit for details.

The DECpc AXP 150 Jensen was the DEC workstation introduced in 1993 and the first Alpha-based system to support Windows NT. It is almost as old as the Linux kernel itself and kernel support has been discontinued for years, while we’ll see how much longer it will take until this and other support. forms from the early 1990s were finally removed from the source tree.

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