[ia64] End of life...

[Émeric MASCHINO]

Hi,

I can feel the pain: I was on Debian/ia64 for more than a decade when
Debian announced that the ia64 support will be dropped for Jessie. In
fact, all Linux distributions, but Gentoo, dropped their ia64 support.
The only benefit of this is that all ia64 lost souls can now
concentrate their efforts on the only remaining free and open project
for ia64: Gentoo/ia64. I've completed the switch to Gentoo/ia64 last
year and don't regret it. Overall, ia64 is running fine but there are
still plenty of things to be done. And with the forthcoming Wayland
revolution, it would be sad to miss it.

Thank you Marcel for all these years devoted to FreeBSD/ia64 and if
you're looking for other ia64 challenges, I bet that Gentoo/ia64 would
be glad to recruit talent as you ;-)

     Émeric


2014-05-15 22:12 GMT+02:00 Marcel Moolenaar <marcel at xcllnt.net>:
> 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
>
>