Linux 6.7 Set To Drop Support For Itanium IA-64

[jabl]

I could say some of the last Itanium buyers might be having a very bad case of buyers remorse.

Au contraire, I believe most of them were happy they got their final order in, allowing them to kick the inevitably upcoming migration project down the road a few more years.

[stormcrow]

Itanium systems outsold Opteron systems for many years. I don't get this "Opteron killed Itanium" narrative and never have.

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/4285/Risc_loss.png for instance.

Opteron didn't kill Itanium. x86 in general (added: and x86_64 specifically but no individual product as such) did on the low end along with the people Intel wanted to attract stuck with IBM/Sun for those that were in the market for expensive high-availability hardware on the high end. The reason HP was able to push Itanium for as long as they did was because the people stuck with DEC's entirely proprietary OpenVMS didn't have any other migration path. Between HP and Intel they killed Alpha architecture, DEC's intended path forward. Those who could stuck with Alpha based systems as long as they could find the parts for them. Few if any of those are going to be running Linux, anyway.

[Dawn]

Opteron didn't kill Itanium. x86 in general (added: and x86_64 specifically but no individual product as such) did on the low end along with the people Intel wanted to attract stuck with IBM/Sun for those that were in the market for expensive high-availability hardware on the high end. The reason HP was able to push Itanium for as long as they did was because the people stuck with DEC's entirely proprietary OpenVMS didn't have any other migration path. Between HP and Intel they killed Alpha architecture, DEC's intended path forward. Those who could stuck with Alpha based systems as long as they could find the parts for them. Few if any of those are going to be running Linux, anyway.

OpenVMS only made up ~5% of Integrity systems sales (HP-UX accounted for over 80%, and absolutely dominated big-system sales, with Nonstop and - prior to 2010 - Windows Server making up the majority of the remainder.)

[stormcrow]

OpenVMS only made up ~5% of Integrity systems sales (HP-UX accounted for over 80%, and absolutely dominated big-system sales, with Nonstop and - prior to 2010 - Windows Server making up the majority of the remainder.)

Windows Server wasn't an impediment to migration. Technically, neither was HP-UX as it's a Unix-like with much more in common with Unices at the time than the wholly proprietary OpenVMS. There were migration paths available to IBM AIX, SPARC/Solaris (Sun/Fujitsu and later Oracle's greed-driven mismanagement). Still, I grant the argument that people tend to stick where they are regardless until they have no choices but to move. For the low-mid tier x86-64 was "good enough", while the high end stuck with the devils they knew already. The HPC crowd would go with whoever topped the performance charts and won the contracts. The support libraries for science HPC work just expanded to accommodate which ever platforms won the lab contracts.

[Dawn]

Windows Server wasn't an impediment to migration. Technically, neither was HP-UX as it's a Unix-like with much more in common with Unices at the time than the wholly proprietary OpenVMS. There were migration paths available to IBM AIX, SPARC/Solaris (Sun/Fujitsu and later Oracle's greed-driven mismanagement). Still, I grant the argument that people tend to stick where they are regardless until they have no choices but to move. For the low-mid tier x86-64 was "good enough", while the high end stuck with the devils they knew already. The HPC crowd would go with whoever topped the performance charts and won the contracts. The support libraries for science HPC work just expanded to accommodate which ever platforms won the lab contracts.

No real argument with most of this.

UX customers went to mission-critical x86, once the DL980 showed up to demonstrate that mission-critical x86 could be non-terrible. Big ones tended to go to AIX or z/Linux at higher rates, but a lot kept it in the house with Superdome X and its succesors. I would guess about 25% of the 2012 UX base are still on the platform, and a majority of those have ongoing migration projects.

That being said, I think you still overrate the degree to which HP cared about VMS. They were trying to get out of the VMS business long before they pulled the plug on their Itanium commitment as a whole. Itanium 9300 only supported VMS on entry level systems, and 9500 didn't support VMS at all (until HP sold VMS off and VSI added support several years later.) By 2012 Itanium was effectively UX only, with a small but profitable side gig in Nonstop.

It says a lot that UX was literally the only operating system that the Superdome2, the most profitable part of the late Itanium lineup, ever ran.

[mercster]

Maybe it's just because I was using Linux pretty early, but it always feels weird when the kernel removes support for some architecture. Back in the mid-90s doing 'make config', it was always impressive to see all the architectures, devices, and protocols supported... maybe only a small number of people need that, but it was a badge of honor for the Linux kernel, that it was a sort of Swiss army knife that would suit many different purposes.

Nowadays the world is different, I understand that... and I do sympathize with the burden "dead" branches in the kernel might cause to developers and maintainers in other parts of the tree. Still... seems like there could be some kind of alternative to either keeping it in the main tree, and removing it. I dunno... maybe not. It's just an emotional reaction on my part, I reckon.

(My mind is drawn to AX.25 packet radio in the kernel, for instance. Is there a whole lot of people using it these days? Probably not... but someone out there might be. Support for all these exotic older standards is something I feel like should somehow be preserved. I don't even know if AX.25 is still in the kernel...)

(Note 2: To say "IA-64 users are all using HP-UX and OpenVMS anyway"... again seems strange to me. Back in the good ol' days, someone might have remarked "But why should their only choices be closed? Doesn't all hardware deserve a free and open alternative?" Again, I know I'm probably just being romantic.)

[Dawn]

Maybe it's just because I was using Linux pretty early, but it always feels weird when the kernel removes support for some architecture. Back in the mid-90s doing 'make config', it was always impressive to see all the architectures, devices, and protocols supported... maybe only a small number of people need that, but it was a badge of honor for the Linux kernel, that it was a sort of Swiss army knife that would suit many different purposes.

Nowadays the world is different, I understand that... and I do sympathize with the burden "dead" branches in the kernel might cause to developers and maintainers in other parts of the tree. Still... seems like there could be some kind of alternative to either keeping it in the main tree, and removing it. I dunno... maybe not. It's just an emotional reaction on my part, I reckon.

(My mind is drawn to AX.25 packet radio in the kernel, for instance. Is there a whole lot of people using it these days? Probably not... but someone out there might be. Support for all these exotic older standards is something I feel like should somehow be preserved. I don't even know if AX.25 is still in the kernel...)

(Note 2: To say "IA-64 users are all using HP-UX and OpenVMS anyway"... again seems strange to me. Back in the good ol' days, someone might have remarked "But why should their only choices be closed? Doesn't all hardware deserve a free and open alternative?" Again, I know I'm probably just being romantic.)

For what it's worth, I agree. I don't see the same push to remove PA or Alpha, and those are a hell of a lot older and slower than Itanium is.

A lot of people just have a weird dislike of Itanium.

[mercster]

For what it's worth, I agree. I don't see the same push to remove PA or Alpha, and those are a hell of a lot older and slower than Itanium is.

A lot of people just have a weird dislike of Itanium.

Heh... .yeah, I guess the only difference might be that Alpha and PA-RISC were around longer/had more reach. So people have more of it hanging around. There's probably the prejudice of "Haha, Itanium failed, so lame." Or maybe there's another good reason, I'm no Itanium expert.

[Eirikr1848]

The last remaining Itanium user is shaking right now.

Naw. As the last non-corporate Itanium customer I was shaking last year when it was rumored to be removed. I bought a new HP machine in like 2021 thinking that I could slap Linux on it and use it for years to come. I… misunderstood that because I hadn’t heard of it didn’t mean it was a new cool thing… but instead was an old one on its way out.

I tried to find out how much it would cost to keep Itanium support in the kernel but no one here responded to me. Some Redditors said it would stick around for awhile.

I can’t learn how to do it myself, I couldn’t buy myself a few more years of support. So I guess. Whelp. Damnit.

[Eirikr1848]

Maybe it's just because I was using Linux pretty early, but it always feels weird when the kernel removes support for some architecture. Back in the mid-90s doing 'make config', it was always impressive to see all the architectures, devices, and protocols supported... maybe only a small number of people need that, but it was a badge of honor for the Linux kernel, that it was a sort of Swiss army knife that would suit many different purposes.

Nowadays the world is different, I understand that... and I do sympathize with the burden "dead" branches in the kernel might cause to developers and maintainers in other parts of the tree. Still... seems like there could be some kind of alternative to either keeping it in the main tree, and removing it. I dunno... maybe not. It's just an emotional reaction on my part, I reckon.

(My mind is drawn to AX.25 packet radio in the kernel, for instance. Is there a whole lot of people using it these days? Probably not... but someone out there might be. Support for all these exotic older standards is something I feel like should somehow be preserved. I don't even know if AX.25 is still in the kernel...)

(Note 2: To say "IA-64 users are all using HP-UX and OpenVMS anyway"... again seems strange to me. Back in the good ol' days, someone might have remarked "But why should their only choices be closed? Doesn't all hardware deserve a free and open alternative?" Again, I know I'm probably just being romantic.)

Yeah I feel ya. But now most Linux devs are corporate-powered so they can’t poopoo the cashman.

IBM owns Red Hat, Red Hat does a lot of Nouveau work for example.

It’s the new corpo-open-source song and dance, my friend and ideological purists need to learn new skills to fill the void: or we need to find ways to fund legacy “cruft” (aka usable stuff for someone, somewhere, somewhen.)

——

Or move it all to Linux-Legacy and find a way to allow distros or users to enable Linux-legacy support, etc.