Will anybody save Linux on Itanium?
Will anybody save Linux on Itanium?
It's doomed to sink... but the how and why is interesting
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
“Will anyone save it?” Literally anyone can update the code, the reason it’s being removed is because no one wants to maintain it. It’s pretty much dead and gone at this point.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Although the proposal to remove support for Intel's infamous Itanium architecture - aka Itanic - from Linux was rebuffed in February, just weeks ago, in October, the move was approved for kernel 6.7.
To summarize the summary, when Intel began its EPIC project – no, really, it stands for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing [PDF] – the idea of out of order execution (OoOE) in microprocessors was new, and for x86, unproven.
In brief, the concept of OoOE is that processors can break down complex x86 instructions into smaller, RISC-like chunks, resequence them on the fly to run them as fast as possible, and then reassemble the results into the order that the software originally expected.
In 1994, it wasn't certain that future x86 processors would be able to effectively exploit the instruction level parallelism, or ILP as HP called it [PDF], in machine code.
The Pentium Pro provided the design of the CPU core in the Centrino family of chips from Intel Haifa in Israel, which saved the company from the big, hot, and uncompetitive Netburst architecture of the P4.
The only other VLIW machine that the FOSS desk knows reached the market was Transmeta's Crusoe – one of our articles about which, ironically, also mentioned Intel's Fred Pollack.
The original article contains 558 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
My confusion at the "will anybody save linux on itanium?" Is where did they go all these years when they could have contributed to the code?