8 ms·

The push to save the Itanium architecture in Linux

123 points by rwmj 3y ago

bell-cot 3y ago
It would be interesting to see a real census of the folks who want to keep ia64 support in Linux, with some breakdown of their motivations. Cases like "Control software for our factory's special $Millions-dollar machine only exists for ia64" seem far more sympathetic than "I love my basement collection of archaic computer hardware".
- anotherhue 3y ago
  Such a factory wouldn't be chasing the latest version of anything, it would probably be air-gapped.
  - jabl 3y ago
    Most likely such Itanium systems would be running VMS or HP-UX rather than Linux.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      I was wondering is Itanium was still supported by HP-UX... It's apparently the only architecture supported by HP-UX currently. That's kinda sad. Must also be a little weird being on the HP-UX team, pushing out updates to a dying platform.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        In the enterprise software space, a ton of work goes into maintaining old platforms and backporting security patches and the like to old versions of software. That a not small part of what you're paying those companies to do.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    Point...but 's/would/should/g' is far too often the reality.
  - josefx 3y ago
    Just because some of the hardware and its control software may be stuck in ancient times doesn't mean that they wouldn't want to upgrade other software or add other hardware that requires a newer kernel to function.
    - fisf 3y ago
      But in practice, it is often not possible or allowed to simply add other software or hardware to those systems. Those are delivered and certified as-is and upgrades are a no-go.
    - phkahler 3y ago
      Yeah they could upgrade the processor. And since it apparently runs Linux already, most the software should be relatively portable. Now if they're using a 9-bit serial UART there may be a problem...
    - not_the_fda 3y ago
      They wouldn't, its too much of a risk. The update could break the control software and bring everything down. If its working don't touch it, otherwise you might bring down production and lose lots of money. A new kernel brings no value to a currently working system.
- sneela 3y ago
  Yep. I'm very curious to know who actually use itanium cpus anymore. I've only seen it referenced in a couple of research papers that are from... 2015-2016? I even went out of my way to see if a local refurbished electronics seller had itaniums many months ago and they said, "Itanium, huh. Haven't heard that name in a long time".
  - aeyes 3y ago
    In 2017 Intel released a new Itanium CPU so someone must have been using them.
    - gsnedders 3y ago
      AFAIK they were contractually obliged to produce a new generation. However: > [The 2017 CPU] has no microarchitecture improvements over [the 2012 CPU]; despite nominally having a different stepping, it is functionally identical with the 9500 series, even having exactly the same bugs, the only difference being the 133 MHz higher frequency of 9760 and 9750 over 9560 and 9550 respectively. So they practically _didn't_.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        I wonder how many got sold or if it was just a run to fulfill that contract and nothing else.
        Kon-Peki 3y ago
        We got 4 from that last batch that Intel ran. Our cloud migration project is way behind schedule and we needed the insurance. Support for the VMS version we’re running on them goes until 2028 I think. We’re decommissioning a couple of first-gen Itanium servers in the next few months. I think that the assumption is that we’d have to pay for disposal, so if someone wants them for Linux kernel support and can pick them up in Chicago, reply from an account with contact info and I’d send an email if it’s possible to give them away for free (I can ask).
- jabl 3y ago
  > "I love my basement collection of archaic computer hardware" Nothing wrong with retro-computing enthusiasts, per se. From the Linux kernel perspective it's about the architecture having maintainers and not causing pain for the rest of the kernel. The Linux m68k port is probably a good example of this, hard to see it having any kind of commercial value these days, and the maintainers are hobbyists. But with the Itanium port not having anybody willing to maintain it, bye bye. Probably also helps that qemu has m68k support, so even if you love the idea of running Linux on your old Amiga, you can actually do the development on a mainstream platform.
  - repelsteeltje 3y ago
    Your argument comes down to: put your money where your mouth is. I think that makes sense, both for hobbyists and commercial value. A census is one, but unless someone's willing to pick up the gauntlet...
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Yes, but most retro computing enthusiasts are more than happy to run retro software as well, because that's where the fun is. Running a 2023 OS on 1993 hardware is going to be a frustrating experience anyway even if you get it to work because of the relative change in performance since then. Hardware is usually best matched with software from roughly the same era if you want anything close to acceptable performance. My oldest still-in-use hardware is now 15 years old and I'm amazed it does as well as it does but I'm also quite aware of the limitations and that stuff was absolutely top-of-the-line when it was bought. Parts are unobtanium and if it goes (which could happen every time it power cycles) we'll probably hold a small service but not cry too much.
  - creshal 3y ago
    > The Linux m68k port is probably a good example of this, hard to see it having any kind of commercial value these days There's some 500 Eurofighters around with two dozen m68k each for their avionics (though not running Linux – and they're slooowly getting updated to less obsolete architectures), and I suspect they're not the only current use case. Industrial life cycles can be very, very long.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  The only reasonable thing would be having exotic architectures around to ensure the kernel is as portable as possible and doesn't make any weird assumptions. I think that's OpenBSD's reasoning for some of the CPUs supported. No idea though if itanium brings anything interesting to the table in that regard. If it's just EFI woes, not much is gained really.
  - cesarb 3y ago
    > The only reasonable thing would be having exotic architectures around to ensure the kernel is as portable as possible and doesn't make any weird assumptions. Some of these "weird assumptions" are necessary or useful for either performance or maintainability reasons. Having special cases for exotic architectures makes the kernel harder to change, and makes it harder to refactor it to user better code and data structures. That's, for instance, the reason support for the original Intel 386 was removed. Yes, this makes the kernel less portable, but that's a tradeoff.
    - chasil 3y ago
      SPARC is big-endian, and is likely the greatest correction to coders who maintain "all the world's a VAX!" Much gdb has been spilt on these shores. Both the VAX and x86(-64) are little-endian. The Itanium could run either, but was little-endian by default (HP-UX would toggle to big-endian).
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Fascinatingly, ARM (aarch64) can also do either; while the only operating system I know about that uses this fact is NetBSD, I have actually run that in big endian mode on a Raspberry Pi (3b) and it does actually work.
        chasil 3y ago
        That is a really interesting fact.
- CrLf 3y ago
  Archaic hardware should be running period-correct software anyway. It’s not that they can’t stay on a previous kernel. Itanium isn’t truly archaic, though. It was only discontinued 3 years ago.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  > basement I was looking for an itanium server for a while and literally couldn't find one that wasn't silly money
  - dspillett 3y ago
    I expect there are people out there who were in the right place at the right time when the company they work for was decommissioning some IA64 kit, and got it for nothing or close to. So there will be at least some hobbyists who haven't paid silly money. Because of the niche it ended up in, and how small that niche was, you either get the kit for very little that way or a lot by buying it from someone who got it that way, there is not much in between.
  - repelsteeltje 3y ago
    Back in the day, we reluctantly abandoned PowerPC, UltraSPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha AXP, MIPS... because the bright future was Intel Itanium. Bye, bye, SUN, Silicon Graphics, Acorn, DEC/Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Sony NEWS. That future never materialized.
    - flyinghamster 3y ago
      About the only real "success" of Itanium was wiping out the competing architectures. ARM only survived because its low power consumption was perfect for mobile and embedded use. Once Acorn was gone, we didn't see a mainstream ARM-based personal computer again until the M1 Mac.
      - jabl 3y ago
        > About the only real "success" of Itanium was wiping out the competing architectures. Arguably x86-64 would have wiped those out anyway, with or without Itanium.
        unregistereddev 3y ago
        Most likely, yes. But without Itanium, the competing architectures would have had several more years of development before x86-64 was released. While the end result would probably be similar, it is interesting to think about what improvements may have been made in competing architectures in those interim years.
- hannob 3y ago
  I'm not even sure that's so relevant. Ultimately, the question is: Is there a community of people willing to maintain it properly? And it appears to me that's Torvalds' position as well.
- ta1243 3y ago
  I'd say its the other way round. You want updates for your million-dollar business critical hardware, you can bloody well pay for it.
  - ianai 3y ago
    Except it would more likely be “no more software to run this? Such a shame <off goes the hardware>”
    - imtringued 3y ago
      I have to disappoint you then. There is no such thing as a sufficiently good compiler for the Itanium architecture. The software that was worth turning on the hardware for never existed.
anotherhue 3y ago
The out-of-tree repo https://github.com/torvalds/linux/compare/master...lenticularis39:linux-ia64:master-revert-ia64-removal https://github.com/torvalds/linux/compare/master...lenticula... From a distance I think it should stay gone - nothing is stopping the users from using an older kernel forever-more - plenty of other devices do and it's not like these are going to be used for anything important.
aaronlehmann 3y ago
"Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm IA64?" Sadly ChatGPT does a poor job of generating parody lyrics so I won't subject you to them, and I'd probably do even worse unassisted.
dale_glass 3y ago
Is there any point, even? In my understanding, Itanium never went anywhere other than rare enterprise use, and never been anything more than a minority, inconvenient, uncompetitive architecture. At this point what servers remain will be slow, power hungry and unsupported. Even if the kernel did support Itanium, how many projects are even building for it anymore, let alone taking care of making sure it still works? Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64. Unlike something like the Amiga, it never had an enthusiast fanbase, and unlike say, SPARC or SGI hardware I don't think it ever had any fancy weird enterprise features you couldn't get on AMD64. The only motherboards I can find are from Supermicro, and they support up to 16 GB RAM, and have a PCI-X slot (that's the server-type version of PCI, before PCI Express).
- rob74 3y ago
  That's the question I was asking myself too when I read quotes such as: > Frank Scheiner complained to the mailing list, saying that he and others had been working to resolve the problems with this architecture and had been rewarded by seeing it removed anyway That sounds a lot like "sunk costs fallacy" - "we invested a lot of work into this, so we want to go on with it". But it doesn't answer if there are enough actual users left to justify this work?
- acomjean 3y ago
  >Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64. I worked on a project targeting hp superdomes (PA RISC). When that architecture was on its way out they started looking at amd64 as a replacement though Itaniun was the “successor” to hp risc and could run hpux (HP was involved somehow). It really never took off. The advance compilers that would give itanium software speed never really happened.
  - u320 3y ago
    HP wasn't just involved, it was their baby from the beginning. But they realized that the investment was too large and risky and Intel needed a 64-bit arch. So they partnered up.
arp242 3y ago
"We need more time to fix the problems" seems a bit late. Itanium is not a new architecture. From a previous thread:[1] > And with the already severely limited choice of current architectures for the masses (x86, arm), it becomes even more important to keep what we have or had in the past, to not end in a 'If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' type of future. Which seems like a rather odd argument, considering Linux supports 18 other architectures, and IA-64 was about as far removed "from the masses" as possible and only ever available in "Call To Get a Quote"-priced server hardware. I can't see a single good reason to keep it alive: there is extremely limited hobby interest ("a guy in Germany who wants to keep support for ideological reasons and can't even afford the energy costs of turning the servers on too often" is a very weak signal), and commercial production interest is probably close to zero – if not exactly zero: most Itanium server are running HP-UX or VMS, and if you're running Linux you probably don't want to upgrade because it sees so little testing (6.1 is supported until the 2030s!) [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/59a76177-8ed4-e71e-9b11-a673298b5b4b@web.de/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/59a76177-8ed4-e71e-9b11-a673298b...
- codeflo 3y ago
  Also, if there is commercial interest for Linux on IA-64, someone should be able to pay someone to maintain kernel support and perform extensive tests. The fact that this hasn't yet happened yet is at least potentially a signal.
  - TheCondor 3y ago
    Say there is commercial interest… it’s all custom work. Having support in the mainline kernel is a fairly small piece of the equation, there aren’t active distributions that support it. At best you’d be putting a newer kernel on an ancient distribution, worse you’d be building a hand made distribution. If they are supporting some old Linux, I think it would be best to patch that kernel if there are flaws or fixes. If there are newer features they are attempting to add, I assert that you probably want more than the kernel like the C library.. maybe a lot more pieces. it’s not easy and it’s a pain but an out of line kernel patch doesn’t seem that bad, whether or not the support is mainlined seems pretty small compared to maintaining the tooling chain and everything else. The support and “new features” is pretty limited too, usb-c isn’t coming, thunderbolt isn’t coming, no advanced power management is coming.
orrymr 3y ago
Bit of a noob-ish question: But why can't folks just continue to use older versions of the kernel, with the ia64 support?
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  They can. But bugfixes may not be packported due to lack of developers. Same with drivers for newer hardware which (potentially) could be plugged into an Itanium system. Worse if such newer code relies on kernel infrastructure that changed in the meanwhile. For users that don't ever change their setup, there's no issue really.
jacquesm 3y ago
How many of these systems are still used in production today? Is there any info on that? Does anybody here still run one?
- xaerise 3y ago
  Not many. At my previous company they had two servers with dual Itanium CPUs. One CPU failed and they bought a spare used one from Germany. We were informed that there was about 10 CPUs left for spare in the world by our provider. The company decommisioned the servers in 2019 so now there are probably four more :p But since it is a failed architecure, there can't be that many production systems ( < 1000 )
- stefan_ 3y ago
  There is no reason to believe any production Itanium system ever ran Linux.
  - acdha 3y ago
    That depends on what you mean by production. The only Itanium server I ever used was at a supercomputing center where it was considered production as a service for researchers, and that ran Linux. The researchers I worked with compiled a few things for it but it was slower than AMD on almost everything so nobody used it. I think the one exception was someone who had an extremely large dataset which could fit in memory on that system.
  - mrpippy 3y ago
    That is totally false. If nothing else, SGI sold Itanium systems that only ran Linux. In addition, there were plenty of Linux Itanium HPC clusters on the Top500, there are 20 listed in June 2006 when I randomly searched: https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/ https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    Why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix
krylon 3y ago
NetBSD support for ia64 is a "work in progress" according to their website: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ia64/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ia64/ Do hobbyists looking to keep their machines alive actually need Linux or would another FOSS Unixoid system meet their needs as well? I'm sure the NetBSD people would love to welcome some volunteers, especially if they have actual hardware for debugging and testing.
- jabl 3y ago
  Looking at the archives of the netbsd-ia64 mailing list, it doesn't seem like the netbsd ia64 port is particularly healthy. The most recent discussion thread is a thread that was cross-posted to various ia64 related mailing lists, by the person that now removed the Linux kernel support. And AFAICS with no comments from any people involved in the netbsd port. Before that, the previous activity on that mailing list was a few message back in 2020. And before that, a few messages in 2016. It's dead, Jim. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-ia64/ http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-ia64/
  - krylon 3y ago
    My inner compulsive optimist would say that means they'd be especially happy about volunteers with access to actual hardware. But it's possible there's just not many people interested in this platform. Hardware was expensive, and most of it is rather large and power-hungry. HP did build Itanium workstations, but I think they stopped a long time ago.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bobsmooth 3y ago
Supporting everything is a nice ideal but someone has to do it.
api 3y ago
This is a good little example of why complexity is such a plague in software: every feature or capability has a constituent somewhere. Simplicity, while it has massive value, has no constituents. Nobody weeps for it. This is why a “hello world” app is 100X larger than the cumulative storage of a computer 30 years ago.
- Clamchop 3y ago
  Doesn't ring as true as you appear to be "weeping" for simplicity here. Others must be, as well, as this plea is an appeal to the Linux project's decision to simplify by deprecating Itanium support.
8MGfAgnaTAD4o 3y ago
More than 20 years ago, a company was hired by Intel to develop an automated migration of 32-bit C++ code to 64-bit C++ code specifically for the Itanium. The CPU was not yet in its final form and we had access to a prototype version , it was an incredible interesting project...that was cancel after some time. Sometimes I reflect about that work and how impossible the end goal really was, but we tried!
vkaku 3y ago
I do not want to comment in particular about Itanium. But I have a slew of concerns around old hardware removal, especially drivers like the QLogic 10GBE NICs gone[1]. It means that old software that could potentially virtualize Linux with these adapters are no more useful and that Linux is actually leading to deprecation of older computers in the field. I have this feeling that 6.6.x needs a LTS[2] branch and I'd skip running any newer kernels in production until there is a hint that Linux intends to keep compatibility for at least 10 more years. I'm mostly happy with 6.1.x at the moment. With BSDs offering increasingly better Linux application and driver compatibility, there is a good argument to do away with using the Linux distros in favour of something that works just good enough. Currently, my stable systems run Debian Bookworm 12.2 (LTS 6.1), yet I'm evaluating FreeBSD 14.0+ to see how much it can run any legacy Linux applications without any issues. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37987543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37987543 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history
- kjs3 3y ago
  From link 1: * Since it has been abandoned by the vendor and no one has stepped up to maintain it, delete it. * So all you have to do is commit to maintain it and it wouldn't disappear. Problem solved. You will be stepping up to do the work, right, or sticking with "someone other than me should be compelled to support this thing I want". The reason we can have nice (weird, antiquated) things like Linux on m68k is there are people actually stepping up to do the work.
  - vkaku 3y ago
    Lack of maintenance suggests that stable working drivers were never there? Or that means the interfaces are volatile? The kernel developers are just making things worse if they want no compatibility across the kernel releases unless they have people meddling with the code periodically. And they will be okay to support the driver for 10 more years as part of 6.1? None of this put together makes sense. They do not have a good test infrastructure for lots of devices. Most drivers have no regression testbeds today. That just tells me things will keep breaking more regularly. It is good that the m68k enthusiasts care, and yet this development model isn't sustainable to begin with.
westmeal 3y ago
Who cares about itanium?
pk-protect-ai 3y ago
please don't.
jmbwell 3y ago
I can understand the Itanium community feeling like they are trying to do The Open Source Thing by volunteering to keep it alive, only to be (what might feel like being) summarily dismissed by the rest of the community. I’m afraid that the community has grown so enormously and is subject to such powerful economic forces that if there are more people who need/want better EFI support (or whatever it may be) than who can keep up Itanium support, the Itanium community is probably out of luck. I daydreamed a bit about picking up some Itanium equipment used just so I could say I’ve experienced it. It looks like a lot of power hungry gear with a lot of unsupported components that was all originally bound to some black-box vendor support contract. It would’ve been a hoot to have a big 90s mainframe running IRC or something, but I decided to allocate my hobby time elsewhere.
- samus 3y ago
  Your last paragraph is actually a very succinct summary for why the community decided to drop it.
lamontcg 3y ago
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die."

123 points by rwmj 3y ago

It would be interesting to see a real census of the folks who want to keep ia64 support in Linux, with some breakdown of their motivations. Cases like "Control software for our factory's special $Millions-dollar machine only exists for ia64" seem far more sympathetic than "I love my basement collection of archaic computer hardware".

anotherhue 3y ago
Such a factory wouldn't be chasing the latest version of anything, it would probably be air-gapped.
- jabl 3y ago
  Most likely such Itanium systems would be running VMS or HP-UX rather than Linux.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    I was wondering is Itanium was still supported by HP-UX... It's apparently the only architecture supported by HP-UX currently. That's kinda sad. Must also be a little weird being on the HP-UX team, pushing out updates to a dying platform.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      In the enterprise software space, a ton of work goes into maintaining old platforms and backporting security patches and the like to old versions of software. That a not small part of what you're paying those companies to do.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Point...but 's/would/should/g' is far too often the reality.
- josefx 3y ago
  Just because some of the hardware and its control software may be stuck in ancient times doesn't mean that they wouldn't want to upgrade other software or add other hardware that requires a newer kernel to function.
  - fisf 3y ago
    But in practice, it is often not possible or allowed to simply add other software or hardware to those systems. Those are delivered and certified as-is and upgrades are a no-go.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    Yeah they could upgrade the processor. And since it apparently runs Linux already, most the software should be relatively portable. Now if they're using a 9-bit serial UART there may be a problem...
  - not_the_fda 3y ago
    They wouldn't, its too much of a risk. The update could break the control software and bring everything down. If its working don't touch it, otherwise you might bring down production and lose lots of money. A new kernel brings no value to a currently working system.
sneela 3y ago
Yep. I'm very curious to know who actually use itanium cpus anymore. I've only seen it referenced in a couple of research papers that are from... 2015-2016? I even went out of my way to see if a local refurbished electronics seller had itaniums many months ago and they said, "Itanium, huh. Haven't heard that name in a long time".
- aeyes 3y ago
  In 2017 Intel released a new Itanium CPU so someone must have been using them.
  - gsnedders 3y ago
    AFAIK they were contractually obliged to produce a new generation. However: > [The 2017 CPU] has no microarchitecture improvements over [the 2012 CPU]; despite nominally having a different stepping, it is functionally identical with the 9500 series, even having exactly the same bugs, the only difference being the 133 MHz higher frequency of 9760 and 9750 over 9560 and 9550 respectively. So they practically _didn't_.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I wonder how many got sold or if it was just a run to fulfill that contract and nothing else.
      - Kon-Peki 3y ago
        We got 4 from that last batch that Intel ran. Our cloud migration project is way behind schedule and we needed the insurance. Support for the VMS version we’re running on them goes until 2028 I think. We’re decommissioning a couple of first-gen Itanium servers in the next few months. I think that the assumption is that we’d have to pay for disposal, so if someone wants them for Linux kernel support and can pick them up in Chicago, reply from an account with contact info and I’d send an email if it’s possible to give them away for free (I can ask).
jabl 3y ago
> "I love my basement collection of archaic computer hardware" Nothing wrong with retro-computing enthusiasts, per se. From the Linux kernel perspective it's about the architecture having maintainers and not causing pain for the rest of the kernel. The Linux m68k port is probably a good example of this, hard to see it having any kind of commercial value these days, and the maintainers are hobbyists. But with the Itanium port not having anybody willing to maintain it, bye bye. Probably also helps that qemu has m68k support, so even if you love the idea of running Linux on your old Amiga, you can actually do the development on a mainstream platform.
- repelsteeltje 3y ago
  Your argument comes down to: put your money where your mouth is. I think that makes sense, both for hobbyists and commercial value. A census is one, but unless someone's willing to pick up the gauntlet...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Yes, but most retro computing enthusiasts are more than happy to run retro software as well, because that's where the fun is. Running a 2023 OS on 1993 hardware is going to be a frustrating experience anyway even if you get it to work because of the relative change in performance since then. Hardware is usually best matched with software from roughly the same era if you want anything close to acceptable performance. My oldest still-in-use hardware is now 15 years old and I'm amazed it does as well as it does but I'm also quite aware of the limitations and that stuff was absolutely top-of-the-line when it was bought. Parts are unobtanium and if it goes (which could happen every time it power cycles) we'll probably hold a small service but not cry too much.
- creshal 3y ago
  > The Linux m68k port is probably a good example of this, hard to see it having any kind of commercial value these days There's some 500 Eurofighters around with two dozen m68k each for their avionics (though not running Linux – and they're slooowly getting updated to less obsolete architectures), and I suspect they're not the only current use case. Industrial life cycles can be very, very long.
iforgotpassword 3y ago
The only reasonable thing would be having exotic architectures around to ensure the kernel is as portable as possible and doesn't make any weird assumptions. I think that's OpenBSD's reasoning for some of the CPUs supported. No idea though if itanium brings anything interesting to the table in that regard. If it's just EFI woes, not much is gained really.
- cesarb 3y ago
  > The only reasonable thing would be having exotic architectures around to ensure the kernel is as portable as possible and doesn't make any weird assumptions. Some of these "weird assumptions" are necessary or useful for either performance or maintainability reasons. Having special cases for exotic architectures makes the kernel harder to change, and makes it harder to refactor it to user better code and data structures. That's, for instance, the reason support for the original Intel 386 was removed. Yes, this makes the kernel less portable, but that's a tradeoff.
  - chasil 3y ago
    SPARC is big-endian, and is likely the greatest correction to coders who maintain "all the world's a VAX!" Much gdb has been spilt on these shores. Both the VAX and x86(-64) are little-endian. The Itanium could run either, but was little-endian by default (HP-UX would toggle to big-endian).
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Fascinatingly, ARM (aarch64) can also do either; while the only operating system I know about that uses this fact is NetBSD, I have actually run that in big endian mode on a Raspberry Pi (3b) and it does actually work.
      - chasil 3y ago
        That is a really interesting fact.
CrLf 3y ago
Archaic hardware should be running period-correct software anyway. It’s not that they can’t stay on a previous kernel. Itanium isn’t truly archaic, though. It was only discontinued 3 years ago.
mhh__ 3y ago
> basement I was looking for an itanium server for a while and literally couldn't find one that wasn't silly money
- dspillett 3y ago
  I expect there are people out there who were in the right place at the right time when the company they work for was decommissioning some IA64 kit, and got it for nothing or close to. So there will be at least some hobbyists who haven't paid silly money. Because of the niche it ended up in, and how small that niche was, you either get the kit for very little that way or a lot by buying it from someone who got it that way, there is not much in between.
- repelsteeltje 3y ago
  Back in the day, we reluctantly abandoned PowerPC, UltraSPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha AXP, MIPS... because the bright future was Intel Itanium. Bye, bye, SUN, Silicon Graphics, Acorn, DEC/Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Sony NEWS. That future never materialized.
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    About the only real "success" of Itanium was wiping out the competing architectures. ARM only survived because its low power consumption was perfect for mobile and embedded use. Once Acorn was gone, we didn't see a mainstream ARM-based personal computer again until the M1 Mac.
    - jabl 3y ago
      > About the only real "success" of Itanium was wiping out the competing architectures. Arguably x86-64 would have wiped those out anyway, with or without Itanium.
      - unregistereddev 3y ago
        Most likely, yes. But without Itanium, the competing architectures would have had several more years of development before x86-64 was released. While the end result would probably be similar, it is interesting to think about what improvements may have been made in competing architectures in those interim years.
hannob 3y ago
I'm not even sure that's so relevant. Ultimately, the question is: Is there a community of people willing to maintain it properly? And it appears to me that's Torvalds' position as well.
ta1243 3y ago
I'd say its the other way round. You want updates for your million-dollar business critical hardware, you can bloody well pay for it.
- ianai 3y ago
  Except it would more likely be “no more software to run this? Such a shame <off goes the hardware>”
  - imtringued 3y ago
    I have to disappoint you then. There is no such thing as a sufficiently good compiler for the Itanium architecture. The software that was worth turning on the hardware for never existed.

anotherhue 3y ago

The out-of-tree repo https://github.com/torvalds/linux/compare/master...lenticularis39:linux-ia64:master-revert-ia64-removal https://github.com/torvalds/linux/compare/master...lenticula... From a distance I think it should stay gone - nothing is stopping the users from using an older kernel forever-more - plenty of other devices do and it's not like these are going to be used for anything important.

aaronlehmann 3y ago

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm IA64?" Sadly ChatGPT does a poor job of generating parody lyrics so I won't subject you to them, and I'd probably do even worse unassisted.

dale_glass 3y ago

Is there any point, even? In my understanding, Itanium never went anywhere other than rare enterprise use, and never been anything more than a minority, inconvenient, uncompetitive architecture. At this point what servers remain will be slow, power hungry and unsupported. Even if the kernel did support Itanium, how many projects are even building for it anymore, let alone taking care of making sure it still works? Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64. Unlike something like the Amiga, it never had an enthusiast fanbase, and unlike say, SPARC or SGI hardware I don't think it ever had any fancy weird enterprise features you couldn't get on AMD64. The only motherboards I can find are from Supermicro, and they support up to 16 GB RAM, and have a PCI-X slot (that's the server-type version of PCI, before PCI Express).

rob74 3y ago
That's the question I was asking myself too when I read quotes such as: > Frank Scheiner complained to the mailing list, saying that he and others had been working to resolve the problems with this architecture and had been rewarded by seeing it removed anyway That sounds a lot like "sunk costs fallacy" - "we invested a lot of work into this, so we want to go on with it". But it doesn't answer if there are enough actual users left to justify this work?
acomjean 3y ago
>Anything you can run on Itanium is almost certainly going to work better on AMD64. I worked on a project targeting hp superdomes (PA RISC). When that architecture was on its way out they started looking at amd64 as a replacement though Itaniun was the “successor” to hp risc and could run hpux (HP was involved somehow). It really never took off. The advance compilers that would give itanium software speed never really happened.
- u320 3y ago
  HP wasn't just involved, it was their baby from the beginning. But they realized that the investment was too large and risky and Intel needed a 64-bit arch. So they partnered up.

arp242 3y ago

"We need more time to fix the problems" seems a bit late. Itanium is not a new architecture. From a previous thread:[1] > And with the already severely limited choice of current architectures for the masses (x86, arm), it becomes even more important to keep what we have or had in the past, to not end in a 'If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' type of future. Which seems like a rather odd argument, considering Linux supports 18 other architectures, and IA-64 was about as far removed "from the masses" as possible and only ever available in "Call To Get a Quote"-priced server hardware. I can't see a single good reason to keep it alive: there is extremely limited hobby interest ("a guy in Germany who wants to keep support for ideological reasons and can't even afford the energy costs of turning the servers on too often" is a very weak signal), and commercial production interest is probably close to zero – if not exactly zero: most Itanium server are running HP-UX or VMS, and if you're running Linux you probably don't want to upgrade because it sees so little testing (6.1 is supported until the 2030s!) [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/59a76177-8ed4-e71e-9b11-a673298b5b4b@web.de/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/59a76177-8ed4-e71e-9b11-a673298b...

codeflo 3y ago
Also, if there is commercial interest for Linux on IA-64, someone should be able to pay someone to maintain kernel support and perform extensive tests. The fact that this hasn't yet happened yet is at least potentially a signal.
- TheCondor 3y ago
  Say there is commercial interest… it’s all custom work. Having support in the mainline kernel is a fairly small piece of the equation, there aren’t active distributions that support it. At best you’d be putting a newer kernel on an ancient distribution, worse you’d be building a hand made distribution. If they are supporting some old Linux, I think it would be best to patch that kernel if there are flaws or fixes. If there are newer features they are attempting to add, I assert that you probably want more than the kernel like the C library.. maybe a lot more pieces. it’s not easy and it’s a pain but an out of line kernel patch doesn’t seem that bad, whether or not the support is mainlined seems pretty small compared to maintaining the tooling chain and everything else. The support and “new features” is pretty limited too, usb-c isn’t coming, thunderbolt isn’t coming, no advanced power management is coming.

orrymr 3y ago

Bit of a noob-ish question: But why can't folks just continue to use older versions of the kernel, with the ia64 support?

RetroTechie 3y ago
They can. But bugfixes may not be packported due to lack of developers. Same with drivers for newer hardware which (potentially) could be plugged into an Itanium system. Worse if such newer code relies on kernel infrastructure that changed in the meanwhile. For users that don't ever change their setup, there's no issue really.

jacquesm 3y ago

How many of these systems are still used in production today? Is there any info on that? Does anybody here still run one?

xaerise 3y ago
Not many. At my previous company they had two servers with dual Itanium CPUs. One CPU failed and they bought a spare used one from Germany. We were informed that there was about 10 CPUs left for spare in the world by our provider. The company decommisioned the servers in 2019 so now there are probably four more :p But since it is a failed architecure, there can't be that many production systems ( < 1000 )
stefan_ 3y ago
There is no reason to believe any production Itanium system ever ran Linux.
- acdha 3y ago
  That depends on what you mean by production. The only Itanium server I ever used was at a supercomputing center where it was considered production as a service for researchers, and that ran Linux. The researchers I worked with compiled a few things for it but it was slower than AMD on almost everything so nobody used it. I think the one exception was someone who had an extremely large dataset which could fit in memory on that system.
- mrpippy 3y ago
  That is totally false. If nothing else, SGI sold Itanium systems that only ran Linux. In addition, there were plenty of Linux Itanium HPC clusters on the Top500, there are 20 listed in June 2006 when I randomly searched: https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/ https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix

krylon 3y ago

NetBSD support for ia64 is a "work in progress" according to their website: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ia64/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ia64/ Do hobbyists looking to keep their machines alive actually need Linux or would another FOSS Unixoid system meet their needs as well? I'm sure the NetBSD people would love to welcome some volunteers, especially if they have actual hardware for debugging and testing.

jabl 3y ago
Looking at the archives of the netbsd-ia64 mailing list, it doesn't seem like the netbsd ia64 port is particularly healthy. The most recent discussion thread is a thread that was cross-posted to various ia64 related mailing lists, by the person that now removed the Linux kernel support. And AFAICS with no comments from any people involved in the netbsd port. Before that, the previous activity on that mailing list was a few message back in 2020. And before that, a few messages in 2016. It's dead, Jim. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-ia64/ http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-ia64/
- krylon 3y ago
  My inner compulsive optimist would say that means they'd be especially happy about volunteers with access to actual hardware. But it's possible there's just not many people interested in this platform. Hardware was expensive, and most of it is rather large and power-hungry. HP did build Itanium workstations, but I think they stopped a long time ago.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bobsmooth 3y ago

Supporting everything is a nice ideal but someone has to do it.

api 3y ago

This is a good little example of why complexity is such a plague in software: every feature or capability has a constituent somewhere. Simplicity, while it has massive value, has no constituents. Nobody weeps for it. This is why a “hello world” app is 100X larger than the cumulative storage of a computer 30 years ago.

Clamchop 3y ago
Doesn't ring as true as you appear to be "weeping" for simplicity here. Others must be, as well, as this plea is an appeal to the Linux project's decision to simplify by deprecating Itanium support.

8MGfAgnaTAD4o 3y ago

More than 20 years ago, a company was hired by Intel to develop an automated migration of 32-bit C++ code to 64-bit C++ code specifically for the Itanium. The CPU was not yet in its final form and we had access to a prototype version , it was an incredible interesting project...that was cancel after some time. Sometimes I reflect about that work and how impossible the end goal really was, but we tried!

vkaku 3y ago

I do not want to comment in particular about Itanium. But I have a slew of concerns around old hardware removal, especially drivers like the QLogic 10GBE NICs gone[1]. It means that old software that could potentially virtualize Linux with these adapters are no more useful and that Linux is actually leading to deprecation of older computers in the field. I have this feeling that 6.6.x needs a LTS[2] branch and I'd skip running any newer kernels in production until there is a hint that Linux intends to keep compatibility for at least 10 more years. I'm mostly happy with 6.1.x at the moment. With BSDs offering increasingly better Linux application and driver compatibility, there is a good argument to do away with using the Linux distros in favour of something that works just good enough. Currently, my stable systems run Debian Bookworm 12.2 (LTS 6.1), yet I'm evaluating FreeBSD 14.0+ to see how much it can run any legacy Linux applications without any issues. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37987543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37987543 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history

kjs3 3y ago
From link 1: * Since it has been abandoned by the vendor and no one has stepped up to maintain it, delete it. * So all you have to do is commit to maintain it and it wouldn't disappear. Problem solved. You will be stepping up to do the work, right, or sticking with "someone other than me should be compelled to support this thing I want". The reason we can have nice (weird, antiquated) things like Linux on m68k is there are people actually stepping up to do the work.
- vkaku 3y ago
  Lack of maintenance suggests that stable working drivers were never there? Or that means the interfaces are volatile? The kernel developers are just making things worse if they want no compatibility across the kernel releases unless they have people meddling with the code periodically. And they will be okay to support the driver for 10 more years as part of 6.1? None of this put together makes sense. They do not have a good test infrastructure for lots of devices. Most drivers have no regression testbeds today. That just tells me things will keep breaking more regularly. It is good that the m68k enthusiasts care, and yet this development model isn't sustainable to begin with.

westmeal 3y ago

Who cares about itanium?

pk-protect-ai 3y ago

please don't.

jmbwell 3y ago

I can understand the Itanium community feeling like they are trying to do The Open Source Thing by volunteering to keep it alive, only to be (what might feel like being) summarily dismissed by the rest of the community. I’m afraid that the community has grown so enormously and is subject to such powerful economic forces that if there are more people who need/want better EFI support (or whatever it may be) than who can keep up Itanium support, the Itanium community is probably out of luck. I daydreamed a bit about picking up some Itanium equipment used just so I could say I’ve experienced it. It looks like a lot of power hungry gear with a lot of unsupported components that was all originally bound to some black-box vendor support contract. It would’ve been a hoot to have a big 90s mainframe running IRC or something, but I decided to allocate my hobby time elsewhere.

samus 3y ago
Your last paragraph is actually a very succinct summary for why the community decided to drop it.

lamontcg 3y ago

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die."