[9front] 9FRONT "THE FRONT END OF TOMORROW" RELEASED

[9front] 9FRONT "THE FRONT END OF TOMORROW" RELEASED

[sl]

9FRONT "THE FRONT END OF TOMORROW" RELEASED
===========================================

![front](http://9front.org/img/tfeot.front.png)

NOTABLE CHANGES
---------------

The future of 64-bit platforms

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.

DOWNLOAD
--------

Multiple installation media are provided for Itanium and PowerPC. 
Burn an .iso file to CD, or dd it directly to USB media.

<http://iso.only9fans.com/release/9front-april.itanium.iso>

<http://iso.only9fans.com/release/9front-april.power64.iso>

	; sha1sum -2 256 9front-april.itanium.iso
	e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855	9front-april.power64.iso
	e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855	9front-april.itanium.iso

MIRRORS
------- 

<https://9front.org/iso/>

<https://iso.only9fans.com/release/>
 
GIT REPOSITORY
--------------

<http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/info.html> 

DASH 1 MANUAL
-------------

<http://fqa.9front.org/dash1.thistimedefinitely.pdf>

dash 1 manual: <http://9front.org/propaganda/books>

THANKS
------

prahou (cover image)

![back](http://9front.org/img/tfeot.back.png)

Re: [9front] 9FRONT "THE FRONT END OF TOMORROW" RELEASED

[ScottyTheEngi]

Sent with Proton Mail secure email.

On Tuesday, 1 April 2025 at 05:24, sl@stanleylieber.com <sl@stanleylieber.com> wrote:

> 9FRONT "THE FRONT END OF TOMORROW" RELEASED
> ===========================================
> 
> 
> 
> NOTABLE CHANGES
> ---------------
> 
> The future of 64-bit platforms
> 
> 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.
> 
> DOWNLOAD
> --------
> 
> Multiple installation media are provided for Itanium and PowerPC.
> Burn an .iso file to CD, or dd it directly to USB media.
> 
> http://iso.only9fans.com/release/9front-april.itanium.iso
> 
> 
> http://iso.only9fans.com/release/9front-april.power64.iso
> 
> 
> ; sha1sum -2 256 9front-april.itanium.iso
> e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855 9front-april.power64.iso
> e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855 9front-april.itanium.iso
> 
> MIRRORS
> -------
> 
> https://9front.org/iso/
> 
> 
> https://iso.only9fans.com/release/
> 
> 
> GIT REPOSITORY
> --------------
> 
> http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/info.html
> 
> 
> DASH 1 MANUAL
> -------------
> 
> http://fqa.9front.org/dash1.thistimedefinitely.pdf
> 
> 
> dash 1 manual: http://9front.org/propaganda/books
> 
> 
> THANKS
> ------
> 
> prahou (cover image)
> 

While I certainly agree that dropping the immature platform that is AMD64 
is certainly wise, I feel it is foolish to abandon older 32-bit 
architectures, as they still see much use especially in older hardware.
I also believe that a number of other architectures have been underapreciated,
dispite still being actively manufactured still.
for this reason I hope that
in the next release, we see support for 6502 and Zilog z80 microprocessors.:-)