The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 10, 2023 18:22 UTC (Fri) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118)
In reply to: The push to save Itanium by thoeme
Parent article: The push to save Itanium

> I have to repeat the question of rsidd in another way: *why* do the few remaining users of Itanium need or want new kernels ?

You might not need (nor want) new kernels per se, but you might reasonably want a modern userspace, and ince, say, systemd or docker or whatever starts requiring $NEXT_BIG_THING (like it was with cgroup2), you may suddenly find yourself out of luck.

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 11, 2023 1:12 UTC (Sat) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link] (1 responses)

...and?

At this point the upcoming Raspberry Pi 5 will outperform all but the final last-gasp 8-core-16-thread Itanium CPUs from what benchmarks I've been able to dig up.

It's an INCREDIBLY dead platform because it's just so atrocious from the base fundamental design all the way up to the software (non-)support. It's as dead as the Bulldozer variants from AMD were compared to previous and later models, it just has no benefits at all versus many other options.

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 16, 2023 8:58 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

We have all kinds of outdated hardware (including an IA-64 box) in order to do comparisons between hardware across the ages. In my case I compare them using software written in C that does not use modern glibc features, so I don't need a modern userland and thus not a modern kernel (so our IA-64 actually has some ancient system), but others with a similar motivation may need an up-to-date userland.

I don't know if that is the motivation of those who want to keep IA-64 in the kernel and glibc, though.

The push to save Itanium

Posted Nov 12, 2023 9:35 UTC (Sun) by pm215 (subscriber, #98099) [Link]

The trouble with wanting a modern userspace is that that userspace tends to be written to assume a certain level of performance from its CPU and a certain amount of RAM it can use; as time goes on userspace gets gradually more CPU hungry and more RAM hungry. Linux is better than most for this but not immune, and at some point even if you can technically run a modern distro on a bit of retrocomputing hardware you won't be happy with the performance compared to continuing to use that five year old as-originally-shipped version.