* 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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