Linux 6.7 has many exciting features including initial support for the Bcachefs file-system, Intel Meteor Lake graphics are stable as is the rest of the MTL platform support, initial NVIDIA GSP firmware support with the Nouveau driver, retiring of Intel Itanium support, and other new features with Linux 6.7.
↫ Michael Larabel
The end of Itanium support is unforgivable. Itanium is the future, and Linux will miss the boat.
As an administrator of HP-UX (that is obviously getting smaller by the day), your comment legitimately made me laugh. Linux is going to miss the boat, indeed.
Yay!
NetBSD Itanium port WHEN?
Possibly when there is a decent FOSS emulator.
So much more hardware will be washed down the drain and never to break even on it’s carbon budget, and so it continue$!
And yet it lives 🙂
Linux 6.6 (with official Itanium support) is LTS release, which usually means 5 years of updates.
Linux 6.7 has already been patched at individual level to bring Itanium back. T2 SDE has commited their support (https://t2sde.org/#news-2023-12-05) and this post on the kernel mailing list suggests it works fine on all generations of Itanium tested (https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2024/01/msg00000.html).
@jvakon “And yet it lives”
The problem with those kernels is that Itanium is basically corporate kit, and boutique Linux kernels are hacker / maker space projects, so I doubt it changes things much in that I still expect the corporates will offload the hardware in bulk, but I concede we might get a few maker type projects extending the life of a small fraction of the eWaste.
Itanium never sold in huge numbers, and by the time the few corporates who bought it got around to throwing it out it was already becoming irrelevant.
For other architectures (sparc, alpha, power etc) there was older used hardware on the market cheaply and in large enough quantities while the new stuff was still being actively developed which served to promote open source/hobbyist development.
Miss the *boat* LOL – that’s pure gold.