Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> I don't really have feelings either way - but haven't we gone further and even
> backpatched things like spinlock support for new arches in the past?
Mmmm ... don't really think those cases were comparable. We weren't
adding support for a whole new OS. Now, you might argue that Windows
on arm64 will be just like Windows on x86_64, but I think the jury
is still out on that. Microsoft was so Intel-only for so many years
that I bet they've had to change quite a bit to make it go on ARM.
Also, the cases of back-patched spinlock support that I can find
in the last few years were pretty low-risk. I'll grant that
c32fcac56 was a bit blue-sky because hardly anybody had RISC-V
at that point, but by the same token anybody relying on it at the
time would be dealing with a beta-grade OS too. On the other hand,
1c72d82c2 was immediately testable in the buildfarm, and f3bd00c01
was importing code already verified by our OpenBSD packagers.
As I said upthread, this seems like something to put in at the
beginning of a dev cycle, not post-feature-freeze.
regards, tom lane
