Dear all, here comes the usual update on Linux/ia64, this time for v6.13: In short: looking good! It felt like this cycle required a bigger than usual effort to fix build regressions for ia64 during the merge window or maybe the number of regressions was bigger, but by the time 6.13-rc1 was released things had stablized. There weren't any additional regressions detected in the following RCs, apart from needed adaptations due to changes in the kernel configuration that is used for the regular testing of the ia64 machines available to us. Per release (candidate) sources can be found on [1]. [1]: https://github.com/johnny-mnemonic/linux-ia64 This time we also put something "new" and useful for ia64 machines into the kernel. Albeit small changes like extending the processor feature flags or including useful driver code for specific machines (enabling HBA operation of the integrated SAS controller in rx2800 i2s) or giving Ski its own processor model - the MonteSkito. :-) Because from the exposed processor feature flags, it is equal to a Montecito processor. Apropos Ski: During this cycle we also managed to improve the performance of the simulator by up to 1.53 times for disk writes and up to 1.36 times for package builds (for example up to 1.47 times for the configure step and up to 1.39 times for the make step, all determined by instrumenting the package builds and taking the timing on the host). Well, connoisseurs of Ski might argue that 1.x times slow is still slow, but it's also a considerable speedup for a micro-change in the firmware (the ski-bootloader in this case). The change is trivial ([2]) and possibly related to the max clock of the host processor, but the effect is real. Ski still hogs a full hardware thread, but you can get more out of it, so that's a plus. [2]: https://github.com/linux-ia64/ski/commit/b53b78c2379ec8f0e78ed37986db654a73d69534 Apart from the benchmarking we also examined what else is possible with Ski: * In system mode ski can run a HP-Sim kernel (thanks to Sergei also with an initrd - like a real machine) and boot complete operating systems. * Also networking is supported but during our testing so far required a separate real interface on the host (can be a USB2Ethernet adapter) for use by Ski. It also allows to mount NFS shares from other machines than the host inside Ski, which makes it possible to have a shared storage during runtime between Ski and the host. Together with the remote control we came up so far, this can be used to quickly execute ia64 binaries inside Ski with output forwarded to the host (including the exit code). Booting the kernel can be avoided for later invocations by SIGSTOPping the Ski process and SIGCONTinuing it when needed. * We also looked into running Ski inside a Docker container which should make it easy to use for container savvy people. To round this up it is planned to create one or more howto(s) for Ski to give people all required information at hand to use it easily, making Ski an adequate solution for emulating ia64. If you desire more performance, get a real machine or invest into a much faster host machine, or even better put some effort into further improving Ski's performance. The autobuilders for Linux mainline and Linux stable and toolchain continue to be useful for maintaining Linux and glibc for ia64. They are also proof that there is an easy way to build-test source changes for ia64. Ready-made toolchains are available from [3]. But you can also build those yourself. Two howtos were created for that: (1) about building a toolchain to create a (ia64) kernel ([4]), like the ones from Arnd and (2) for manually building a (ia64) kernel with such a toolchain ([5]). [3]: https://ftp.machine-hall.org/pub/toolchains/ [4]: http://epic-slack.org/#!articles/2024-12-01-building-a-toolchain.md [5]: http://epic-slack.org/#!articles/2024-12-15-building-your-own-kernel.md Lastly a few words about documentation: Parts of the vast but widely distributed IA-64 documentation (like papers, articles, presentations, white papers, general documentation and data sheets) available on the web were catalogued and links were curated on [6] for quick and easy usage and occasional reading. [6]: http://epic-linux.org/#!/docs/ Find the last Linux/ia64 update on [7]. [7]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/775f2bd5-5567-4da2-9b79-8f2e7fc9b38a@xxxxxx/ **** Thank you all for your hard work on Linux! Cheers, Frank et al
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