Ia64 support

frontsidebus · Nov 16, 2011, 2:43 PM

hi guys, pfsense have a ia64 (itanium2) compatibility?

regards

dotdash · Nov 16, 2011, 3:58 PM

No.
It would be possible, as FreeBSD supports the architecture, but the team is already busy with the i386/amd64 builds. I don't see it happening.

frontsidebus · Nov 16, 2011, 4:03 PM

damm :-\ thanks for info.

regards

jasonlitka · Nov 17, 2011, 6:09 PM

Why exactly would you want to do this? Itanium boxes are expensive, slow and power hungry.

frontsidebus · Nov 17, 2011, 7:51 PM

I have a lot of itanium 2 16gb scsi 10k servers.
Retired a bull novascale and i hope reuse them.

jimp · Nov 21, 2011, 6:59 PM

It's not a Tier 1 architecture in FreeBSD these days anyhow… From /usr/src/UPDATING

NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT FreeBSD 8.x IS SLOW ON IA64 OR SUN4V:
        For ia64 the INVARIANTS and INVARIANT_SUPPORT kernel options
        were left in the GENERIC kernel because the kernel does not
        work properly without them.  For sun4v all of the normal kernel
        debugging tools present in HEAD were left in place because
        sun4v support still needs work to become production ready.

So even if you could get them to work, they would be even slower than usual.

See also: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/committers-guide/archs.html