savantu (savantu@email.ro) on 3/25/08 wrote:
>
>-off topic - I have a question if you don't mind : who
>ports a new Linux kernel to IA64 ?

We don't talk about "porting", since it's in the standard
tree and gets updated with all the other architectures. So
it's "just" a matter of maintaining it, which involves
obviously tracking the hardware changes themselves, but
also the infrastructure changes.

But architectures almost never get broken by generic code
changing. It happens (especially when things like "ptrace()"
interfaces change to make them work better, or when there
are fundamental changes to timer infrastructure or stuff
like that), but it's not a big continuous "porting" effort
in any way.

(Statistics: over the last one year, there's been 344
commits that touched arch/ia64. So roughly one commit a
day. Compare that to 34852 commits over-all for the
kernel to get an idea of the scale of this generic vs
arch-specific code).

The main maintainer is Tony Luck at Intel.

>Are you involved in any way in projects that cover Linux
>on IA64 ?
>
>Basically , do you work with Linux IPF machines ?

I told Intel a long time ago that if they can produce a
silent and well-performing workstation I'd add it to my
collection of machines.

It never happened. Apparently such a thing has never been
made.

(Maybe I'm odd, but I refuse to work with a machine that
I have to listen to. It's not just ia64 - I think I turned
on an early quad-Prescott machine exactly once and
refused to ever have anything more to do with it. And no,
if it needs to be in another room due to noise issues, it
can damn well be in another room and powered off).

Linus