On 7/9/25 01:47, Greg KH wrote:
On Tue, Jul 08, 2025 at 03:45:16PM +0800, WangYuli wrote:
Hi greg k-h,
On 2025/7/8 15:20, Greg KH wrote:
Is ia-64 actually being used in the 6.6.y tree by anyone? Who still has that hardware that is keeping that arch alive for older kernels but not newer ones?
I'm afraid I don't quite follow your point.
In v6.7-rc1, we introduced the commit to remove the IA-64 architecture code.
This means linux-6.6.y is the last kernel version that natively supports IA-64, and it also happens to be the currently active LTS release.
6.12.y is the "currently active LTS release", along with 6.6.y and older ones. So are all ia64 users sticking with 6.6.y only?
In any case, I'm quite confused by the current situation because we've essentially broken IA-64 build support in this kernel version.
Sorry, I didn't realize this, it came in for a different patch that fixed a different issue as the thread shows.
If you genuinely believe that no one is using IA-64 devices with linux-6.6.y, then it might be best to directly backport commit cf8e865 ("arch: Remove Itanium (IA-64) architecture") to completely remove IA-64.
This would avoid any misunderstanding.
Otherwise, someone in the future will inevitably assume linux-6.6.y still supports IA-64, when in reality, it's no longer functional.
Who assumes this? Again, who is still using/maintaining this arch for 6.6.y anymore?
I'm all for reverting this, but would like to see some reports of real users first :)
thanks,
greg k-h
I think IA-64 is maintained by Frank Scheiner frank.scheiner@web.de. There's repos for stable and mainline.