On Mon, 2024-10-28 at 02:04 +0000, Pedro Miguel Justo wrote: > > > On Oct 25, 2024, at 00:57, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz > > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Thus, I suggest we drop cross-support for ia64 from binutils for the time > > being in order to reduce the footprint of the binutils package. > > > > This is sad but I think we have to come to terms with the fact that Itanium > has > moved from working platform to history books. For the very few of us fans, it > will be called Vintage. For everyone else, oblivion. > > It doesn't help that there isn't a proper software Itanium emulator - not one > to > the level of QEMU, for example. Or some piece of personal hardware that was > popular, > as it is the case for m68k. That might has helped keeping the platform alive. > With > just scant access to big iron physical servers, there is just no critical > mass to > keep the platform going just on ephemeral volunteer hours.
It's simply not feasible to maintain a Linux distribution for an architecture where the majority of upstream projects have decided to explicitly remove support for it. For Itanium, it doesn't just affect the kernel and glibc but also projects such as Ruby, OpenJDK, WebKit and others which require explicit Itanium support in order to deal with the peculiarities of the architecture. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
