The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 0:08 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: The push to save Itanium by Phantom_Hoover
Parent article: The push to save Itanium

That ought to be HP's problem. They can damn well maintain ia64 out of tree for the next ten years if they're going around making stupid promises like that.

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 1:25 UTC (Fri) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link]

Honestly I expect they’d eventually honor that agreement by offering to buy them something else.

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 10:46 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

This is bread and butter stuff for HPE. All you have to do is pay them enough money and they'll support it.

Last I was at DEC^WCompaq^WHPE, there was still a group offering some degree of support for stuff on *PDP-11s*. That was only 5 odd years ago! (My vague impression is there was some kind of semi-modern re-implementation of PDP-11 involved - not talking original 70s PDPs, though DEC was making PDP-11s until the mid-90s; there might be something more recent than that too).

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 12:52 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

There are a lot of PDP-11's and even PDP-8's 'embedded' in manufacturing equipment which is still working along in refineries and chemical plants. Some were external hardware but eventually most were replaced even in the 2000's with single board SoC like things which keep the plant going. At the plant my dad retired from in the early 2000's, they were being told the newer systems would be run by Itaniums, but it would have required replacing giant equipment systems (aka build a new plant) so they kept the PDP systems with RSX-11(?) running with a contract with HPE. The plant is still running when I drove past it last year so it probably still has a bunch of those somewhere in it.

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 13:10 UTC (Fri) by dezgeg (subscriber, #92243) [Link] (1 responses)

Are those kinds of operations likely to do a upgrade onto the latest (mainline, non-vendor) kernel?

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 13:37 UTC (Fri) by adam820 (subscriber, #101353) [Link]

They're probably more likely to never see an update, ever. Probably offline, never touched, just running some control program 24/7.

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 12:57 UTC (Fri) by Phantom_Hoover (subscriber, #167627) [Link] (1 responses)

They’d probably just tell you to use HP-UX once linux stops being viable. I would guess they can afford to keep it on life support to satisfy contractual obligations.

For me it only adds to the comedy: this guy had to set up an LLC (they obviously only sold Itanium servers B2B) to buy this amazing knock-down deal on a $6600 server, and didn’t feel the need to investigate what he was buying because hey, it says right there in the brochure, 10 years of support! What could possibly go wrong?

HP support for Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 13:44 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

> They’d probably just tell you to use HP-UX once linux stops being viable.

I don't think HP officially supports Linux on Itanium since a long time. So if you want official HP support for a HP Itanium machine, it's HP-UX (since VMS was spun off into a separate company).

As an aside, AFAICT the "roadmap" for HP-UX is essentially "do the minimum necessary security updates while we fleece the customers until they migrate to Linux or Windows on x86"; there's no plan to port HP-UX to any architecture which is still being developed.