(cross posted to several ia64 related mailing list) Hello all, As the maintainer of the EFI subsystem in Linux, I am one of the people that have to deal with the impact that code refactoring for current platforms has on legacy use of such code, in this particular case, the use of shared EFI code in the Itanium Linux port. I am sending this message to gauge the remaining interest in ia64 support across the OS/distro landscape, and whether people feel that the effort required to keep it alive is worth it or not. As a maintainer, I feel uncomfortable asking contributors to build test their changes for Itanium, and boot testing is infeasible for most, even if some people are volunteering access to infrastructure for this purpose. In general, hacking on kernels or bootloaders (which is where the EFI pieces live) is tricky using remote access. The bottom line is that, while I know of at least 2 people (on cc) that test stuff on itanium, and package software for it, I don't think there are any actual users remaining, and so it is doubtful whether it is justified to ask people to spend time and effort on this. And for GRUB in particular (which is what triggered this message), it is unclear to me why any machines still running would not be better served by sticking with their current bootloader build, rather than upgrading to a new build with a refactored EFI layer where the best case scenario is that it boots the kernel in exactly the same way, while there is a substantial risk of regressions. For the Linux kernel itself, the situation is quite similar. There is a non-zero effort involved in keeping things working, and if anyone still needs to run their programs on Itanium, it is not clear to me why that would require a recent version of the OS. So bottom line: I am proposing we drop support for Itanium across the board. Would anyone have any problems with that? Kind regards, Ard.
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