[Pkg-haskell-maintainers] Bug#788324: Unsupported on arches besides i386 and amd64

[Edmund Grimley Evans]

> remove it there.

Remove the assembly code, or remove the package?

It wasn't clear to me whether the bit that reads an Intel performance
counter is central to the whole point of the package, or just a
feature that some users might find useful. If you modified that
function to return 0 on non-Intel architectures, would the package
then be useless on those other architectures?

Also, I'm curious to know how useful this feature is on a multi-core
Intel system. Does the package arrange for processes to remain on a
single core?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter says: "With the
advent of multi-core/hyper-threaded CPUs, systems with multiple CPUs,
and hibernating operating systems, the TSC cannot be relied on to
provide accurate results — unless great care is taken to correct the
possible flaws: rate of tick and whether all cores (processors) have
identical values in their time-keeping registers. There is no promise
that the timestamp counters of multiple CPUs on a single motherboard
will be synchronized."