Re: [crosspost] dropping support for ia64
- To: matoro <matoro_mailinglist_kernel@matoro.tk>
- Cc: Frank Scheiner <frank.scheiner@web.de>, Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>, distributions@lists.freedesktop.org, debian-ia64@lists.debian.org, linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org, port-ia64@netbsd.org, Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>, Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org>, Daniel Kiper <dkiper@net-space.pl>, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>
- Subject: Re: [crosspost] dropping support for ia64
- From: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>
- Date: Sat, 20 May 2023 18:48:25 +0200
- Message-id: <[🔎] 87y1lj0x0m.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de>
- In-reply-to: <5e778e16f93f2286fa535597ba5da24b@matoro.tk> (matoro's message of "Fri, 19 May 2023 16:56:36 -0400")
- References: <[🔎] CAMj1kXFCMh_578jniKpUtx_j8ByHnt=s7S+yQ+vGbKt9ud7+kQ@mail.gmail.com> <[🔎] 59a76177-8ed4-e71e-9b11-a673298b5b4b@web.de> <[🔎] 87bkiilpc4.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> <4e210d61adbe73a1673f113019401e5c@matoro.tk> <[🔎] 12a3e3c5-9465-c97f-58ab-938e80681fbc@web.de> <5e778e16f93f2286fa535597ba5da24b@matoro.tk>
* matoro:
> There is no user-mode emulation for ia64 in QEMU either. The only
> "ongoing" emulation work is Sergei's fork of the old "ski" emulator, but
> this is far from QEMU quality or even usable yet:
> https://github.com/trofi/ski
Yeah, I must have misremembered. Awkward.
So it's a really exclusive club, which makes continued maintenance
efforts even more doubtful.
> Anyway, to summarize this thread for Ard: the answer to the question of
> if anybody is using these machines for anything other than to
> experimentally see if things run or churn out packages is NO. Any
> Itanium machines running useful production workloads are on HP-UX/VMS.
> Possibly Windows Server 2008 or an old RHEL, but unlikely.
RHEL 6 didn't have ia64 anymore. RHEL 5 is out of support. In any
case, the last thing such customers would want (if they existed) is a
rebase from 2.6.18 to a 6.x kernel, or a toolchain upgrade for that
matter. So what we do to current versions really does not matter to
hypothetical commercial ia64 Linux users.
> The only argument for continued support is as you described, the
> argument from the commons, that the ecosystem as a whole benefits from
> diversity of architectures. All that matters is whether you find this
> argument convincing. There are some like myself who do, but I am not a
> kernel maintainer. If you don't, then that should be that.
Some of the variance/diversity isn't actually necessary, though. It's
just that ia64 has some half-done stuff in the tools that no one
bothered to fix, creating complexities elsewhere.
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