| 17 Mar 2026 |
 Puna | more willing than for itanium at least | 16:10:01 |
 Aelin | considering GCC only dropped Itanium like last year I wouldn't worry about sparc64 | 16:10:13 |
 Alyssa Ross | I'm fine with having Nixpkgs support them, but I'd be significatly less fine with Nixpkgs trying to support dead architectures that upstream toolchains have dropped support for. | 16:10:37 |
 7c6f434c | Well, if we have avrgcc, one might argue for some flexibility on what counts as upstream toolchain (but of course the expectations on what patches can be pushed for compatibility fixes are quite restrictive for such a platform) | 16:18:45 |
| Puna | does LLVM even support alpha? | 16:23:49 |
| Puna | doesn't look like it, so anything needing LLVM or Rust would be off the table. not seeing any mentions of it in Go either. GHC can identify it, would have to yoink & patch another prebuilt compiler from debian to test that though. | 16:32:37 |
 Artemis Tosini (NixOS) | nixpkgs can do ppc32, which go won't do | 19:00:32 |
| Puna | yeah i guess no Go isn't much of a blocker | 19:15:21 |
| Puna | (it's also a no-go on ppc64 cus they raised their baseline way too high, and refuse to undo it) | 19:17:11 |
|  colemickens joined the room. | 19:36:22 |
|  @panic:sft.lol left the room. | 20:36:06 |
| 18 Mar 2026 |
|  aphasic joined the room. | 06:35:06 |
| Artemis Tosini (NixOS) | the most cursed architecture one could usefully add to nixpkgs might be netbsd-vax. Relies on somewhat better netbsd support though, most of the BSD work has been focused on FreeBSD | 13:34:01 |
| Artemis Tosini (NixOS) | FreeBSD is fairly aggresive about dropping platform support, the only supported architectures for 16 are amd64, aarch64, armv7, powerprc64 (big endian), powerpc64le, and riscv64 (hard float) | 13:35:34 |
| 20 Mar 2026 |
|  irrelevancy changed their display name from irrelevancyisthygoal One Confused Being to irrelevancy. | 06:46:49 |
 alex taxia | In reply to @artemist:nixos.dev
the most cursed architecture one could usefully add to nixpkgs might be netbsd-vax. Relies on somewhat better netbsd support though, most of the BSD work has been focused on FreeBSD thinking about watching the tapes spin while it builds | 22:25:36 |
| 24 Mar 2026 |
 alexfmpe | what counts as exotic again?
tier 3 and above or what? | 03:31:04 |
| alexfmpe | not directly, but I was kicking the tires in haskell cross and ran into a s390x thing: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/502917 | 03:32:02 |
| Puna | RFC 46 said that the exotic-platform-maintainers github team can be consulted for tier 4, but i'd imagine anything with less support also goes. tier 3 apparently includes loongarch64, the MIPSes, 64-bit POWER, and s390x though, which i would all consider to be some kind of exotic. | 10:27:32 |
| 7c6f434c | RFC 46 sets average expectations, surpassing them is welcome! | 10:44:50 |
|  Lotte (it/its)/Cinny (she/her) θΔ& changed their profile picture. | 12:15:07 |
| 27 Mar 2026 |
 Tristan Ross | Yeah, RFC 46 sets what to expect but a good things to look at is the breakdown table in the manual. https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-platform-breakdown | 15:34:57 |
| 31 Mar 2026 |
| Alyssa Ross | qemu-user officially orphaned upstream cc dramforever | 10:19:43 |
| Alyssa Ross | https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/commit/e813d3be36cf9269ca15764a3de3473149d8a022 | 10:23:06 |
 Stas | i always assumed that the userspace qemu is the more elegant one | 10:28:23 |
| Alyssa Ross | very much not the case | 10:28:51 |
| Alyssa Ross | it has to implement the whole Linux API, so you'll frequently run into stuff that isn't implemented or doesn't work right | 10:29:11 |
| Alyssa Ross | massively bigger surface than emulating hardware | 10:29:19 |
| Stas | true that :( When it runs well, it is like it is not there though | 10:29:38 |
| Stas | I use it to compile all my arm64 builds, not cross compile | 10:29:54 |
