Re: [PATCH 6.6 0000/1226] 6.6.145-rc2 review

[Frank Scheiner <frank.scheiner@web.de>]

On 23.07.26 09:46, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 07:25:26PM +0200, Frank Scheiner wrote:
>> [...]
>> In our fork of Linux post v6.6 we carry a replay of b4b1ddc that makes
>> the corresponding changes also for ia64. This is available on [3] (and
>> also attached to this message) and fixes the build for me.
>>
>> [3]: https://github.com/linux-ia64/linux-ia64/commit/a4085ca68e49f49f962ddff46a901ff3468574b8.patch
>>
>> Can this be included for linux-6.6.y, so it continues to build for
>> ia64 as is?
> 
> Sure, I'll queue it up.

Thanks a lot. That should fix our builds.

> Does anyone still actually use ia64 anymore?  I
> thought those systems were long dead.

Dead, no, not at all, maybe left for dead before we took over in 2023.
But still there were always people taking care of it in the years before
- keeping it alive for us. Much obliged for that. And today things look
vastly different compared to 2023. Tomas already mentioned a few things,
but let me add a few more:

Today we have it all: distributions that support ia64 (T2, EPIC Slack,
Afterglow), hardware and simulator support restored, software support
restored (e.g. Ruby, compilers and more, other things maybe only a
session with an LLM away), Tomas doing all sorts of optimization work
that wasn't done in years, other devs bringing in patches for various
bits of the ecosystem. And just recently out of nowhere ia64 emulators
popped up, one of it being QEMU based ([1]), currently emulating an
Itanium 2 system, with MP support and already working well enough for
MP package builds. There is now even another emulator that tries to
recreate a Merced based system ([2]).

[1]: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64/

[2]: https://github.com/hotlandsoftware/gemu/

Please excuse my optimism here, but emulators with MP support will
bring in a lot more people, the scarce hardware failed to bring in so
far.

Of course we are hobbyists, we're doing it for the fun of it. If you
want to learn more, please head over to:

https://epic-linux.org/

Cheers,
Frank