[ia64] End of life... - really ???

Thu May 15 21:51:53 UTC 2014

Hello

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

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

We have a team working with FreeBSD - the kernel.
Maybe we need extension to the FreeBSD kernel (in the future)
which will be proprietary for HOB's solutions.

But we are also interested that the FreeBSD for IPF continues to life.
The Itanium CPU is still too slow,
but see the problems Intel now has against ARM.

Intel x86 is technology of the 60'ies or 70'ies.
Risc including ARM is technology of the 80'ies.
IPF was the most expensive IT project ever,
technology of the 90'ies.

As we are assembler programmers,
we understand the Itanium has potential,
but that takes time.
(Of course, today most of HOB's sources are C/C++ or Java)

We found, using the HP-UX C-compiler,
the programs sometimes execute at double the speed
compared to compiled with GCC;
just an example.

Intel found a number of companies selling Itanium-servers,
including two Chinese hardware companies.

What about that HOB takes over the FreeBSD for Itanium project?
As said, we are a private company, and we have teams.
In total (different projects) we employee 60 software developers,
and, as training, all need to learn assembler language.
Knowledge of machine instructions is still very helpful for debugging.

HOB employees can read core dumps - without debugging information.
Just as an example.

HOB would continue with FreeBSD for Itanium
and would give the sources to the community,
to everybody who is interested.
(Not including proprietary extensions, of course)

What do we need to do?

Do we need to get a Committer for FreeBSD
or FreeBSD for Itanium or whatever?

Kind regards

Klaus Brandstätter

15.05.14  KB

-----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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