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

[9front] 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