[ia64] End of life...

[Brandstaetter, Klaus]

Hallo

my name is Klaus Brandstätter,
and I'm the CEO of HOB, a medium-sized German software company.

We have a number of projects based on FreeBSD - x86 and IPF.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-ia64 at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-ia64 at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Marcel Moolenaar
Sent: Donnerstag, 15. Mai 2014 22:12
To: ia64 at freebsd.org
Subject: [ia64] End of life...

Executive summary:
Support for ia64 will be removed from FreeBSD-current in the near future which means that FreeBSD-10 is the last release of FreeBSD that supports ia64.

All,

With the FreeBSD project committed to replace GCC with LLVM/clang on the one hand and GDB with LLDB on the other, development tools that are fundamental in supporting ia64 will disappear. While support for
ia64 in FreeBSD could be extended by depending on external developer tools to build and develop ia64, it's clear that the gap between CPU architectures natively supported by FreeBSD and ia64 is widening to a point where it's extremely unlikely that ia64 will ever be a fully supported architecture.

The limited amount of active development that ia64 needed to not rot away has made it possible for ia64 to remain for as long as it did.
This is to the credit of FreeBSD's architecture and cleanliness. But the amount of time that I personally could spent on ia64 has always been on the low end and because of this many core bugs took a very long time to fix and some are still not fixed to date. Me taking a slight detour to port FreeBSD to SGI's Altix 350 & 450 did not help on that front although I found it very educational.

Truth be told -- the learning curve and the enjoyment of working on
ia64 has sloped off for me and the amount of hard work that the CPU architecture demands is only increasing. It's time for me to stop trying and think of other things to spent my free time on. Not that I have to think long or hard -- or at all for that matter ;-) Not only do I not have any free time, I already have plenty of things I can do.

So, my last task is to round things up, turn the lights off and close the door behind me.

For those still running FreeBSD/ia64: thank you!

--
Marcel Moolenaar
marcel at xcllnt.net



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