[9fans] 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[9fans] 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[ori]

As we consider the hardware-based future of 9front, we have come
to the conclusion that our current situation is unsustainable.
When we consider the declining build quality of modern
thinkpads, the 9front disorganization committee has reevaluated
the common approach how to move forward, and believes it's time
to take some bold steps which will carry us strongly into the
future.

We have surveyed 73 randomly selected users on stackoverflow,
and on the strength of the results of this survey, we are
confident that nobody will be impacted if 9front dropped amd64
support.

Given the huge maintenance cost of immature computer
architectures such as mips, 386, arm, arm64 and amd64, we
decided to put our focus on the more mature and stable
achitectures:

power64 and itanuim.

Therefore, all architectures other than power64 and itanium are
thereby frozen, conserved and promoted to end of life.

The advantages are clearly presented here:

- The future is 64-bit: Driven by the needs of browser developers,
  it's become clear that a 32 bit address space is no longer
  enough.  As we work towards expanding Mothra to support modern
  substandards, we will need room to grow.

- Reduced distribution size: We are rapidly approaching the limit
  of what we can fit on a CD. Because we're uncertain if DVDs can
  be supported on Itanium, we feel the need to trim the fat.

- Hardware more cheaply available: With the recent rise of Ebay,
  it's become clear that as large corporations bequeath us their
  wealth of power64 and itanium hardware, the prices of such
  machines will continue to drop.

- Continued hardware popularity: We have done a survey of the
  popularity of Itanium, and in recent years, the number of active
  installations has been stable, giving us confidence that the
  platform will continue well into the future at its current level
  of market dominance.

- Put an end to the "byte order fallacy" problem: With current
  hardware, we have limited ourselves to little endian byte
  order.  Setting aside fact that the correct answer is: BIG
  ENDIAN, we feel that it's critical to our success that all
  processors we support in the future be big-endian.

Given that the compilers for power64 and itanium are currently
not up to our quality standards in regards to optimal
instruction scheduling, the current distribution media only
includes the binaries that that have passed our rigorous quality
controll process.

We believe that with these changes, 9front will replace inferno
as the common dominant consumer operating system.

ISOs are available for download here:

        http://iso.only9fans.com/release/9font-april.itanium.iso
        http://iso.only9fans.com/release/9font-april.power64.iso


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[9fans] Re: 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[Roman Belenov]

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Why not Alpha? Or it's never-released-for-some-reason successor Iota?
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Re: [9fans] Re: 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[ori]

Quoth Roman Belenov <rbelenov@gmail.com>:
> Why not Alpha? Or it's never-released-for-some-reason successor Iota?

Too niche, obviously.


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Re: [9fans] Re: 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[Frank D. Engel, Jr.]

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Not sure about Iota, but Alpha as an architecture name is a likely 
source of confusion that would be nice to avoid.

How easy to mistake an alpha release as a release for Alpha?  Not to 
metion alpha releases for Alpha...

It makes me wonder what the conversations would be like if the company 
Alpha had released their earlier database product (Alpha Four) for the 
Alpha architecture... an alpha of Alpha Four for Alpha?


On 4/1/25 11:35, Roman Belenov wrote:
> Why not Alpha? Or it's never-released-for-some-reason successor Iota?
> *9fans <https://9fans.topicbox.com/latest>* / 9fans / see discussions 
> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans> + participants 
> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/members> + delivery options 
> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription> Permalink 
> <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T82bf787acede8ea1-M4e718e07c68a925214363682> 
>
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Re: [9fans] Re: 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[Roman Belenov]

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Yes, Alpha was not a good name; to fix the issue, they had plan B (Beta), plan 3 (Gamma) to make it even better, and eventually Iota was supposed to be the last word in naming and CPU design, but something went wrong...
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Re: [9fans] Re: 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[Roberto E. Vargas Caballero]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 12:33:47PM -0400, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> Quoth Roman Belenov <rbelenov@gmail.com>:
> > Why not Alpha? Or it's never-released-for-some-reason successor Iota?
> 
> Too niche, obviously.

I have an alpha computer! No alpha support no hackathon!!!!!!

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Re: [9fans] Re: 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[Brian L. Stuart]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 10:59:06PM +0200, Roberto E. Vargas Caballero wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 12:33:47PM -0400, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> > Quoth Roman Belenov <rbelenov@gmail.com>:
> > > Why not Alpha? Or it's never-released-for-some-reason successor Iota?
> > 
> > Too niche, obviously.
> 
> I have an alpha computer! No alpha support no hackathon!!!!!!

I've got an alpha too.  And I'd sure prefer it over anything
in the x86 family.

BLS


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Re: [9fans] Re: 9Front and The Future of Platform Support

[Dan Cross]

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On Tue, Apr 1, 2025, 6:24 PM Brian L. Stuart <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 10:59:06PM +0200, Roberto E. Vargas Caballero
> wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 12:33:47PM -0400, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> > > Quoth Roman Belenov <rbelenov@gmail.com>:
> > > > Why not Alpha? Or it's never-released-for-some-reason successor Iota?
> > >
> > > Too niche, obviously.
> >
> > I have an alpha computer! No alpha support no hackathon!!!!!!
>
> I've got an alpha too.  And I'd sure prefer it over anything
> in the x86 family.
>

Dat memory model, tho.

        - Dan C.

(Seriously, though: x86 got a few things right, TSO, physically tagged
caches, and I would argue the architectural page table format among them.)

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