diff options
author | Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org> | 2022-10-20 15:54:33 +0200 |
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committer | Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org> | 2023-09-11 08:13:17 +0000 |
commit | cf8e8658100d4eae80ce9b21f7a81cb024dd5057 (patch) | |
tree | 31d3b640bebf97c33d354768fc44dfd532c2df81 /arch/ia64/include/asm/user.h | |
parent | a0334bf78b95532cec54f56b53e8ae1bfe7e1ca1 (diff) |
arch: Remove Itanium (IA-64) architecture
The Itanium architecture is obsolete, and an informal survey [0] reveals
that any residual use of Itanium hardware in production is mostly HP-UX
or OpenVMS based. The use of Linux on Itanium appears to be limited to
enthusiasts that occasionally boot a fresh Linux kernel to see whether
things are still working as intended, and perhaps to churn out some
distro packages that are rarely used in practice.
None of the original companies behind Itanium still produce or support
any hardware or software for the architecture, and it is listed as
'Orphaned' in the MAINTAINERS file, as apparently, none of the engineers
that contributed on behalf of those companies (nor anyone else, for that
matter) have been willing to support or maintain the architecture
upstream or even be responsible for applying the odd fix. The Intel
firmware team removed all IA-64 support from the Tianocore/EDK2
reference implementation of EFI in 2018. (Itanium is the original
architecture for which EFI was developed, and the way Linux supports it
deviates significantly from other architectures.) Some distros, such as
Debian and Gentoo, still maintain [unofficial] ia64 ports, but many have
dropped support years ago.
While the argument is being made [1] that there is a 'for the common
good' angle to being able to build and run existing projects such as the
Grid Community Toolkit [2] on Itanium for interoperability testing, the
fact remains that none of those projects are known to be deployed on
Linux/ia64, and very few people actually have access to such a system in
the first place. Even if there were ways imaginable in which Linux/ia64
could be put to good use today, what matters is whether anyone is
actually doing that, and this does not appear to be the case.
There are no emulators widely available, and so boot testing Itanium is
generally infeasible for ordinary contributors. GCC still supports IA-64
but its compile farm [3] no longer has any IA-64 machines. GLIBC would
like to get rid of IA-64 [4] too because it would permit some overdue
code cleanups. In summary, the benefits to the ecosystem of having IA-64
be part of it are mostly theoretical, whereas the maintenance overhead
of keeping it supported is real.
So let's rip off the band aid, and remove the IA-64 arch code entirely.
This follows the timeline proposed by the Debian/ia64 maintainer [5],
which removes support in a controlled manner, leaving IA-64 in a known
good state in the most recent LTS release. Other projects will follow
once the kernel support is removed.
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAMj1kXFCMh_578jniKpUtx_j8ByHnt=s7S+yQ+vGbKt9ud7+kQ@mail.gmail.com/
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/0075883c-7c51-00f5-2c2d-5119c1820410@web.de/
[2] https://gridcf.org/gct-docs/latest/index.html
[3] https://cfarm.tetaneutral.net/machines/list/
[4] https://lore.kernel.org/all/87bkiilpc4.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de/
[5] https://lore.kernel.org/all/ff58a3e76e5102c94bb5946d99187b358def688a.camel@physik.fu-berlin.de/
Acked-by: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'arch/ia64/include/asm/user.h')
-rw-r--r-- | arch/ia64/include/asm/user.h | 53 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 53 deletions
diff --git a/arch/ia64/include/asm/user.h b/arch/ia64/include/asm/user.h deleted file mode 100644 index ec03d3ab8715..000000000000 --- a/arch/ia64/include/asm/user.h +++ /dev/null @@ -1,53 +0,0 @@ -/* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 */ -#ifndef _ASM_IA64_USER_H -#define _ASM_IA64_USER_H - -/* - * Core file format: The core file is written in such a way that gdb - * can understand it and provide useful information to the user (under - * linux we use the `trad-core' bfd). The file contents are as - * follows: - * - * upage: 1 page consisting of a user struct that tells gdb - * what is present in the file. Directly after this is a - * copy of the task_struct, which is currently not used by gdb, - * but it may come in handy at some point. All of the registers - * are stored as part of the upage. The upage should always be - * only one page long. - * data: The data segment follows next. We use current->end_text to - * current->brk to pick up all of the user variables, plus any memory - * that may have been sbrk'ed. No attempt is made to determine if a - * page is demand-zero or if a page is totally unused, we just cover - * the entire range. All of the addresses are rounded in such a way - * that an integral number of pages is written. - * stack: We need the stack information in order to get a meaningful - * backtrace. We need to write the data from usp to - * current->start_stack, so we round each of these in order to be able - * to write an integer number of pages. - * - * Modified 1998, 1999, 2001 - * David Mosberger-Tang <davidm@hpl.hp.com>, Hewlett-Packard Co - */ - -#include <linux/ptrace.h> -#include <linux/types.h> - -#include <asm/page.h> - -#define EF_SIZE 3072 /* XXX fix me */ - -struct user { - unsigned long regs[EF_SIZE/8+32]; /* integer and fp regs */ - size_t u_tsize; /* text size (pages) */ - size_t u_dsize; /* data size (pages) */ - size_t u_ssize; /* stack size (pages) */ - unsigned long start_code; /* text starting address */ - unsigned long start_data; /* data starting address */ - unsigned long start_stack; /* stack starting address */ - long int signal; /* signal causing core dump */ - unsigned long u_ar0; /* help gdb find registers */ - unsigned long magic; /* identifies a core file */ - char u_comm[32]; /* user command name */ -}; - -#endif /* _ASM_IA64_USER_H */ |