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.
In any case, I'm quite confused by the current situation because we've essentially broken IA-64 build support in this kernel version.
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.
Thanks,