this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The last chip was manufactured 3.5 years ago and the last serious user was probably several years before that. Obviously no one's running Itanium with modern hardware.
But just because the hardware isn't modern, doesn't mean the software can't be modern. Tonnes of people run the most recent Linux kernels on 15 year-old laptops, so why not 10 year-old servers? Itanium is only for the hobbyists these days, but so what? Hobbyists have done a good job of ensuring modern Linux can run on 40 year-old 68k. Itanium can theoretically be done, too. It's just a question of whether the hobbyist community has enough of the right people that can actually maintain it.
It wouldn't surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can't be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.
Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it's a case of "put up or shut up".
this is the primary issue – everyone looks at corporations when talking technical debt, but so many medium and small businesses are limping along on so called “enterprise” solutions they were sold a couple decades back and are now completely locked into proprietary formats for which support ended last decade
I'm a mech E in the medical field. We're consistently understaffed. If I validate an Excel worksheet in Excel '08 or a Python program in 3.5 with a specific version of NumPy, we're probably sticking with those versions for a while. Every time I bring up re-validating with the latest version, keeping one old system running the old software requires fewer resources than me or a colleague re-validating.
My whole department is stuck on one version of Python because that was the most recent version when I had an emergency project and developed a data analysis algorithm. We validated it, then as new members were added to my team, they needed a copy, so we had to keep using it. I'll probably re-validate it to the next Python release. It's not only unit tests, or we could automate validation. Unit tests are a tiny part of validating software for making medical decisions. And software that directly runs a medical device (like firmware on an insulin pump) is an order of magnitude more rigorous than what I do.
Side note: there are people who somehow root their insulin pumps and run algorithms on them. There's a group that can get a PID control loop on an insulin pump that has a more simple control scheme on it (because that's how the FDA approved it). The company has been trying to get approval to use PID control in the US for years.