ia64 removal (was: Re: lockref scalability on x86-64 vs cpu_relax)

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 10:41:14AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 1/15/23 01:27, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > More useful perhaps is to look at https://popcon.debian.org/
> > 
> > There are three machines reporting popcon results.  It's dead.
> 
> It's an opt-in mechanism that reports 190,000 machines running Debian
> on x86_64. Do you think that there are only 190,000 servers world-wide
> running Debian?

No.  I think there are so few ia64 machines still in operation that the
effort required to continue to support them is now too high relative
to the benefits.  We've dropped support for hardware that still exists
before, and we'll do it again.  The only question is when.

I still have two ia64 machines in my basement.  I've turned one of them
on once since 2009.  And that was because I had a bug I needed to track
down and fix (2018, commits 4b664e739f77 and 2879b65f9de8).