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From the thread: > I'm a little bias because my company is a re-sellers of the HP Itanium ia64 hardware (RX & ZX boxes), as well as PA-RISC. For that reason,

From the thread: > I'm a little bias because my company is a re-sellers of the HP Itanium ia64 hardware (RX & ZX boxes), as well as PA-RISC. For that reason, I would hate to see it fade away in any sector. The ia64 platform is still widely used with HP-UX Unix and Open VMS users worldwide. This hardware is embedded in most every data center and large and medium companies that have been around since the 80s/90s, its probably the oldest box they have in there but its the one thats in the corner running for 20 years, long before most people started working there. Can anyone speak to how true this is? Are there still a bunch of companies that run some critical service using machines/OSs like this? I have a morbid curiosity about "obsolete" tech still being in everyday use.

jamesfmilne 3y ago
It may be true, but anyone who's still running missing-critical applications on those machines won't migrate to Linux. If they moved to Linux they'd surely just dump the hardware too.
ch_123 3y ago
Yes, there are companies who are still using HP-UX and VMS in production on IA64. The current maintainers of VMS have created an x86 port so I would expect VMS sites will probably move over to it in the coming years. HP-UX is stuck on IA64, meaning that anyone using that platform has a more risky port to Linux if they want to move off IA64.
chasil 3y ago
VMS has a reputation for clustering. At one point, [I heard that] Oracle bought clustering technology out of VMS that was used in making RAC (Real Application Cluster), and ditching Parallel Server. VMS for x86-64 has just emerged for production deployment in the past year. I don't know if it has the OS-level emulation of previous architectures (macro32 and vest, if I am correct in the VAX components, and their Alpha and Itanium equivalents), but the most modern VMS installations are on Itanium. Intel was a big user of VMS in the past, although I don't know if that remains true.
- sterlind 3y ago
  VMS was indeed ahead of its time on clustering. iirc, Leslie Lamport actually discovered Paxos while he was at DEC. DEC was building a fault-tolerant, distributed filesystem, but their protocols were unsound, and Leslie set to work trying to prove that their design goals were impossible. instead, he found a mathematically sound way to do it (Paxos!) see https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html
- dekhn 3y ago
  I read the man pages for Real Application Cluster and they appeared to be lightly reformatted version of the man pages for TruCluster (I can't speak about VMS clustering, I only know Tru64's clustering). TruCluster was definitely interesting, but expensive and fairly esoteric. Most Linux people would just horizontally scale their applications without depending on its features (a filesystem that was shared seamlessly across 8 machines, along with virtual IP address aliasing with fast failover). More details on the underlying technology: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num1/vol8num1art1.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num1/vol8num1art1.p...
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Tru64 was one of the few interesting UNIXes, given its alternative approach to security and kernel design, pity it ended up going away.
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      It looks like Tru64 was descended from OSF/1 which run on top of a Mach microkernel, but what was the alternative approach to security?
vbezhenar 3y ago
On my previous work they run Oracle 9i on HPUX Itanium server. It was horribly slow (my laptop was faster) and weird to work with, it really dragged them down. They had to call pricey consultant for very basic tasks and those consultants did bad job. I could do anything with Linux, but there's no way I'd touch this thing with a long pole, it's absolutely foreign and I'm not really interested learning forgotten proprietary things that have zero value on job market. Still works as of today, AFAIK.
- snovymgodym 3y ago
  That's insane to me. Oracle is just a relational database right? Wonder why that hasn't been migrated long ago. Guess it's just a case of not wanting to touch something that "works".
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Oracle is a marketing engine for consultants that masquerades as a relational database to get through the front door.
    - ForOldHack 3y ago
      Oracle designs, manufactures, and sells both software and hardware products and offers services that complement them (such as financing, training, consulting, and hosting services). So... Lets try that again... Oracle offers services like hosting services, consulting, training, financing, and compliments these with hardware and software products, manufacturing and design. So.. Sales, sales, more sales, coffee, then sales, some sales, and more sales. Oracle is a marketing engine. I am going to call that true.
  - pstuart 3y ago
    It is insane, but it's a reflection of the incentive structure (like everywhere else). Lots of risk with little recognizable upside. It's funny that companies can ostensibly track their expenses down to the penny but can't recognize the costs of technical debt.
  - 3y ago
nubinetwork 3y ago
My $dayjob runs hpux on itanium, however the application has been decommissioned and we have to keep the hardware around for a while still for "reasons"...
kstrauser 3y ago
I’m sure it’s true. I’m also sure there’s zero need to run a new kernel on such a critter. It’s not as though new apps are coming out that only run on Itanic. Shops can run existing programs on the kernel they shipped for, and use far cheaper, faster, and energy-efficient x86-64 hardware for newer things.
wkat4242 3y ago
I like HP-UX and we still have it in work for some old custom connectors to oracle ERP. Mostly PA-RISC stuff even. When I started there we even had some superdomes.
jamesfinlayson 3y ago
Still true - a company that I worked for is still running mission-critical code (not sure how much money but millions of dollars at least) on HP-UX running on Itanium today.
sillywalk 3y ago
Also from the thread: > None of the original companies behind Itanium still produce or support any hardware or software for the architecture, and it is listed as 'Orphaned' in the MAINTAINERS file, as apparently, none of the engineers that contributed on behalf of those companies (nor anyone else, for that matter) have been willing to support or maintain the architecture upstream or even be responsible for applying the odd fix. The Intel firmware team removed all IA-64 support from the Tianocore/EDK2 reference implementation of EFI in 2018. (Itanium is the original architecture for which EFI was developed, and the way Linux supports it deviates significantly from other architectures.) ... > There are no emulators widely available, and so boot testing Itanium is generally infeasible for ordinary contributors. GCC still supports IA-64 but its compile farm no longer has any IA-64 machines. GLIBC would like to get rid of IA-64 too because it would permit some overdue code cleanups.

jamesfmilne 3y ago

It may be true, but anyone who's still running missing-critical applications on those machines won't migrate to Linux. If they moved to Linux they'd surely just dump the hardware too.

ch_123 3y ago

Yes, there are companies who are still using HP-UX and VMS in production on IA64. The current maintainers of VMS have created an x86 port so I would expect VMS sites will probably move over to it in the coming years. HP-UX is stuck on IA64, meaning that anyone using that platform has a more risky port to Linux if they want to move off IA64.

chasil 3y ago

VMS has a reputation for clustering. At one point, [I heard that] Oracle bought clustering technology out of VMS that was used in making RAC (Real Application Cluster), and ditching Parallel Server. VMS for x86-64 has just emerged for production deployment in the past year. I don't know if it has the OS-level emulation of previous architectures (macro32 and vest, if I am correct in the VAX components, and their Alpha and Itanium equivalents), but the most modern VMS installations are on Itanium. Intel was a big user of VMS in the past, although I don't know if that remains true.

sterlind 3y ago
VMS was indeed ahead of its time on clustering. iirc, Leslie Lamport actually discovered Paxos while he was at DEC. DEC was building a fault-tolerant, distributed filesystem, but their protocols were unsound, and Leslie set to work trying to prove that their design goals were impossible. instead, he found a mathematically sound way to do it (Paxos!) see https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html
dekhn 3y ago
I read the man pages for Real Application Cluster and they appeared to be lightly reformatted version of the man pages for TruCluster (I can't speak about VMS clustering, I only know Tru64's clustering). TruCluster was definitely interesting, but expensive and fairly esoteric. Most Linux people would just horizontally scale their applications without depending on its features (a filesystem that was shared seamlessly across 8 machines, along with virtual IP address aliasing with fast failover). More details on the underlying technology: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num1/vol8num1art1.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num1/vol8num1art1.p...
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Tru64 was one of the few interesting UNIXes, given its alternative approach to security and kernel design, pity it ended up going away.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    It looks like Tru64 was descended from OSF/1 which run on top of a Mach microkernel, but what was the alternative approach to security?

vbezhenar 3y ago

On my previous work they run Oracle 9i on HPUX Itanium server. It was horribly slow (my laptop was faster) and weird to work with, it really dragged them down. They had to call pricey consultant for very basic tasks and those consultants did bad job. I could do anything with Linux, but there's no way I'd touch this thing with a long pole, it's absolutely foreign and I'm not really interested learning forgotten proprietary things that have zero value on job market. Still works as of today, AFAIK.

snovymgodym 3y ago
That's insane to me. Oracle is just a relational database right? Wonder why that hasn't been migrated long ago. Guess it's just a case of not wanting to touch something that "works".
- TylerE 3y ago
  Oracle is a marketing engine for consultants that masquerades as a relational database to get through the front door.
  - ForOldHack 3y ago
    Oracle designs, manufactures, and sells both software and hardware products and offers services that complement them (such as financing, training, consulting, and hosting services). So... Lets try that again... Oracle offers services like hosting services, consulting, training, financing, and compliments these with hardware and software products, manufacturing and design. So.. Sales, sales, more sales, coffee, then sales, some sales, and more sales. Oracle is a marketing engine. I am going to call that true.
- pstuart 3y ago
  It is insane, but it's a reflection of the incentive structure (like everywhere else). Lots of risk with little recognizable upside. It's funny that companies can ostensibly track their expenses down to the penny but can't recognize the costs of technical debt.
- 3y ago

nubinetwork 3y ago

My $dayjob runs hpux on itanium, however the application has been decommissioned and we have to keep the hardware around for a while still for "reasons"...

kstrauser 3y ago

I’m sure it’s true. I’m also sure there’s zero need to run a new kernel on such a critter. It’s not as though new apps are coming out that only run on Itanic. Shops can run existing programs on the kernel they shipped for, and use far cheaper, faster, and energy-efficient x86-64 hardware for newer things.

wkat4242 3y ago

I like HP-UX and we still have it in work for some old custom connectors to oracle ERP. Mostly PA-RISC stuff even. When I started there we even had some superdomes.

jamesfinlayson 3y ago

Still true - a company that I worked for is still running mission-critical code (not sure how much money but millions of dollars at least) on HP-UX running on Itanium today.

sillywalk 3y ago

Also from the thread: > None of the original companies behind Itanium still produce or support any hardware or software for the architecture, and it is listed as 'Orphaned' in the MAINTAINERS file, as apparently, none of the engineers that contributed on behalf of those companies (nor anyone else, for that matter) have been willing to support or maintain the architecture upstream or even be responsible for applying the odd fix. The Intel firmware team removed all IA-64 support from the Tianocore/EDK2 reference implementation of EFI in 2018. (Itanium is the original architecture for which EFI was developed, and the way Linux supports it deviates significantly from other architectures.) ... > There are no emulators widely available, and so boot testing Itanium is generally infeasible for ordinary contributors. GCC still supports IA-64 but its compile farm no longer has any IA-64 machines. GLIBC would like to get rid of IA-64 too because it would permit some overdue code cleanups.