hoohoo! Linus pulled a scream test and then forced the naysayers to maintain the crap they want. rofl
I’m far sadder to see the various MIPS machines starting to lose support than I am for Itanic.
I thought MIPS was making a come back
Nah. The current license holder for MIPS announced its death a couple of years ago.
RISC-V is the new hotness.
Wait I thought MIPS and RISC-V was the same ISA?
Similar, but not the same. The biggest difference of course is that the MIPS ISA is still commercially licensed while RISC-V’s ISA is open.
Is anyone actually running modern Linux on Itanium? I have never in my life even heard of anyone using those chips. I find it hard to imagine anyone still using them that isn’t running something legacy.
The last chip was manufactured 3.5 years ago and the last serious user was probably several years before that. Obviously no one’s running Itanium with modern hardware.
But just because the hardware isn’t modern, doesn’t mean the software can’t be modern. Tonnes of people run the most recent Linux kernels on 15 year-old laptops, so why not 10 year-old servers? Itanium is only for the hobbyists these days, but so what? Hobbyists have done a good job of ensuring modern Linux can run on 40 year-old 68k. Itanium can theoretically be done, too. It’s just a question of whether the hobbyist community has enough of the right people that can actually maintain it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.
Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it’s a case of “put up or shut up”.
running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else
this is the primary issue – everyone looks at corporations when talking technical debt, but so many medium and small businesses are limping along on so called “enterprise” solutions they were sold a couple decades back and are now completely locked into proprietary formats for which support ended last decade
I’m a mech E in the medical field. We’re consistently understaffed. If I validate an Excel worksheet in Excel '08 or a Python program in 3.5 with a specific version of NumPy, we’re probably sticking with those versions for a while. Every time I bring up re-validating with the latest version, keeping one old system running the old software requires fewer resources than me or a colleague re-validating.
My whole department is stuck on one version of Python because that was the most recent version when I had an emergency project and developed a data analysis algorithm. We validated it, then as new members were added to my team, they needed a copy, so we had to keep using it. I’ll probably re-validate it to the next Python release. It’s not only unit tests, or we could automate validation. Unit tests are a tiny part of validating software for making medical decisions. And software that directly runs a medical device (like firmware on an insulin pump) is an order of magnitude more rigorous than what I do.
Side note: there are people who somehow root their insulin pumps and run algorithms on them. There’s a group that can get a PID control loop on an insulin pump that has a more simple control scheme on it (because that’s how the FDA approved it). The company has been trying to get approval to use PID control in the US for years.
Yeah. I know of ancient AS/400 and slightly less ancient RS/6000 systems still humming along, keeping insurance companies running.
But they probably haven’t seen software updates in decades. Linux 1.0 didn’t even exist when they were new, let alone 6.7.
The AS/400 platform is still alive and actively maintained by IBM so I’m told, although I think it goes under the Power Systems and IBM i brands now. I know several business still using them, with development teams still coding with RPG etc. Apparently there is also reasonable ecosystem of middleware to interface with more modern systems, and some sort of *nix compatibility layer to run more modern software on the platform.
I’ve never touched one myself, but they are keeping a few greybeards I know in steady work.
Costco still runs stores on AS/400. Ever wonder what those all-text terminals are all over the store?
Hobbyists, especially hobbyists in itanium are an incredibly small market share. Their time is much better spent on what people, and most importantly businesses (who pay their bills) use.
It’s still a supported architecture in Gentoo. I expect it will limp along there for as long as there is viable kernel source (current or LTS) and at least one interested maintainer. So if you have an Itanium machine lying around, you can install a current Linux on it. As long as you’re willing to follow a long set of instructions, anyway.
It seems like NetBSD is working to support Itanium. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ia64/
The meta-analysis on Lobsters is also an interesting read.
Oh thank god, Lobsters is the name of the website. I was not prepared for a rabbit-hole where crustaceans were somehow relevant to a dead-end Intel ISA. I already know too much about MCS-51 because of VHS.
MCS-51
MCS-51, as in the Intel Microcontroller? I’m trying to find some link between that chip and the VHS standard, but I’m not immediately coming up with anything. From my reading, I see that some variants of the MCS-51 incorporate DSP functionality, which would make for a good analogue media device, but I’m not seeing any VHS VCRs that use one.
The same! It’s the “CPU” in the View-Master Interactive Vision. They shipped with a poorly-labeled AMD-manufactured chip that could only be an 8051 or compatible, based on its pinouts. There’s also a 9918-ish video chip, like the ColecoVision, MSX1, or TI-99/4A. The only other big chip is some kind of gate array. I’m almost certain that chip shoves code into 256 bytes of PRG-RAM for the Harvard-architecture MCU… so that Mickey Mouse can fight ghosts with a shotgun.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Although the proposal to remove support for Intel’s infamous Itanium architecture - aka Itanic - from Linux was rebuffed in February, just weeks ago, in October, the move was approved for kernel 6.7.
To summarize the summary, when Intel began its EPIC project – no, really, it stands for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing [PDF] – the idea of out of order execution (OoOE) in microprocessors was new, and for x86, unproven.
In brief, the concept of OoOE is that processors can break down complex x86 instructions into smaller, RISC-like chunks, resequence them on the fly to run them as fast as possible, and then reassemble the results into the order that the software originally expected.
In 1994, it wasn’t certain that future x86 processors would be able to effectively exploit the instruction level parallelism, or ILP as HP called it [PDF], in machine code.
The Pentium Pro provided the design of the CPU core in the Centrino family of chips from Intel Haifa in Israel, which saved the company from the big, hot, and uncompetitive Netburst architecture of the P4.
The only other VLIW machine that the FOSS desk knows reached the market was Transmeta’s Crusoe – one of our articles about which, ironically, also mentioned Intel’s Fred Pollack.
The original article contains 558 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Thanks for the summarization of that summarized summary!
