Very interesting. AFAIK the kernel explicitly gives consume semantics to read_once (and in fact it is not just a compiler barrier on alpha), so technically lowering it to a relaxed operation is wrong.
Does rust have or need the equivalent of std::memory_order_consume? Famously this was deemed unimplementable in C++.
Does anything care about Alpha? The platform hasn't been sold in 20 years.
It wasn’t implemented for the same reason. Rust uses C++20 ordering.