The meta-analysis on Lobsters is also an interesting read.
Oh thank god, Lobsters is the name of the website. I was not prepared for a rabbit-hole where crustaceans were somehow relevant to a dead-end Intel ISA. I already know too much about MCS-51 because of VHS.
MCS-51
MCS-51, as in the Intel Microcontroller? I’m trying to find some link between that chip and the VHS standard, but I’m not immediately coming up with anything. From my reading, I see that some variants of the MCS-51 incorporate DSP functionality, which would make for a good analogue media device, but I’m not seeing any VHS VCRs that use one.
The same! It’s the “CPU” in the View-Master Interactive Vision. They shipped with a poorly-labeled AMD-manufactured chip that could only be an 8051 or compatible, based on its pinouts. There’s also a 9918-ish video chip, like the ColecoVision, MSX1, or TI-99/4A. The only other big chip is some kind of gate array. I’m almost certain that chip shoves code into 256 bytes of PRG-RAM for the Harvard-architecture MCU… so that Mickey Mouse can fight ghosts with a shotgun.
It seems like NetBSD is working to support Itanium. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ia64/
Is anyone actually running modern Linux on Itanium? I have never in my life even heard of anyone using those chips. I find it hard to imagine anyone still using them that isn’t running something legacy.
It’s still a supported architecture in Gentoo. I expect it will limp along there for as long as there is viable kernel source (current or LTS) and at least one interested maintainer. So if you have an Itanium machine lying around, you can install a current Linux on it. As long as you’re willing to follow a long set of instructions, anyway.
The last chip was manufactured 3.5 years ago and the last serious user was probably several years before that. Obviously no one’s running Itanium with modern hardware.
But just because the hardware isn’t modern, doesn’t mean the software can’t be modern. Tonnes of people run the most recent Linux kernels on 15 year-old laptops, so why not 10 year-old servers? Itanium is only for the hobbyists these days, but so what? Hobbyists have done a good job of ensuring modern Linux can run on 40 year-old 68k. Itanium can theoretically be done, too. It’s just a question of whether the hobbyist community has enough of the right people that can actually maintain it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.
Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it’s a case of “put up or shut up”.
running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else
this is the primary issue – everyone looks at corporations when talking technical debt, but so many medium and small businesses are limping along on so called “enterprise” solutions they were sold a couple decades back and are now completely locked into proprietary formats for which support ended last decade
Yeah. I know of ancient AS/400 and slightly less ancient RS/6000 systems still humming along, keeping insurance companies running.
But they probably haven’t seen software updates in decades. Linux 1.0 didn’t even exist when they were new, let alone 6.7.
hoohoo! Linus pulled a scream test and then forced the naysayers to maintain the crap they want. rofl
I’m far sadder to see the various MIPS machines starting to lose support than I am for Itanic.
Nah. The current license holder for MIPS announced its death a couple of years ago.
RISC-V is the new hotness.
