Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 21:50:33 +0000 From: "Brandstaetter, Klaus" <kb@hob.de> To: 'Marcel Moolenaar' <marcel@xcllnt.net>, "ia64@freebsd.org" <ia64@freebsd.org> Cc: "Weinbrenner, Klaus" <klaus.weinbrenner@hob.de>, "Martin, Stefan" <stefan.martin@hob.de>, "Adamovic, Zoran" <zoran.adamovic@hob.de>, "Meyer, Wolfgang" <wolfgang.meyer@hob.de>, "Lauenstein, Juergen" <juergen.lauenstein@hob.de> Subject: RE: [ia64] End of life... - really ??? Message-ID: <E301C27520DD0D4F886945897F66A9EE28C200BA@HOBEX21.hob.de>
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Hello my name is Klaus Brandst=E4tter, I'm the CEO of HOB, a medium-sized German software company. We have a number of projects based in FreeBSD - for x86 and IPF. We have a team working with FreeBSD - the kernel. Maybe we need extension to the FreeBSD kernel (in the future) which will be proprietary for HOB's solutions. But we are also interested that the FreeBSD for IPF continues to life. The Itanium CPU is still too slow, but see the problems Intel now has against ARM. Intel x86 is technology of the 60'ies or 70'ies. Risc including ARM is technology of the 80'ies. IPF was the most expensive IT project ever, technology of the 90'ies. As we are assembler programmers, we understand the Itanium has potential, but that takes time. (Of course, today most of HOB's sources are C/C++ or Java) We found, using the HP-UX C-compiler, the programs sometimes execute at double the speed compared to compiled with GCC; just an example. Intel found a number of companies selling Itanium-servers, including two Chinese hardware companies. What about that HOB takes over the FreeBSD for Itanium project? As said, we are a private company, and we have teams. In total (different projects) we employee 60 software developers, and, as training, all need to learn assembler language. Knowledge of machine instructions is still very helpful for debugging. HOB employees can read core dumps - without debugging information. Just as an example. HOB would continue with FreeBSD for Itanium and would give the sources to the community, to everybody who is interested. (Not including proprietary extensions, of course) What do we need to do? Do we need to get a Committer for FreeBSD or FreeBSD for Itanium or whatever? Kind regards Klaus Brandst=E4tter 15.05.14 KB -----Original Message----- From: owner-freebsd-ia64@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-ia64@freebsd.org= ] On Behalf Of Marcel Moolenaar Sent: Donnerstag, 15. Mai 2014 22:12 To: ia64@freebsd.org Subject: [ia64] End of life... Executive summary: Support for ia64 will be removed from FreeBSD-current in the near future wh= ich 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 on= e hand and GDB with LLDB on the other, development tools that are fundament= al 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 architecture= s 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 h= as 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 am= ount of time that I personally could spent on ia64 has always been on the l= ow 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 ve= ry 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 archite= cture 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 d= oor behind me. For those still running FreeBSD/ia64: thank you! -- Marcel Moolenaar marcel@xcllnt.net ________________________________ Follow HOB: - HOB: http://www.hob.de/redirect/hob.html - Xing: http://www.hob.de/redirect/xing.html - LinkedIn: http://www.hob.de/redirect/linkedin.html - HOBLink Mobile: http://www.hob.de/redirect/hoblinkmobile.html - Facebook: http://www.hob.de/redirect/facebook.html - Twitter: http://www.hob.de/redirect/twitter.html - YouTube: http://www.hob.de/redirect/youtube.html - E-Mail: http://www.hob.de/redirect/mail.html HOB RD VPN - einfach, sicher und flexibel auf alle Unternehmensanwendungen = und -daten zugreifen Praesentation unter: http://www.hob.de/rdvpn2/ HOB GmbH & Co. KG Schwadermuehlstr. 3 D-90556 Cadolzburg Geschaeftsfuehrung: Klaus Brandstaetter, Zoran Adamovic AG Fuerth, HRA 5180 Steuer-Nr. 218/163/00107 USt-ID-Nr. DE 132747002 Komplementaerin HOB electronic Beteiligungs GmbH AG Fuerth, HRB 3416
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