Hello, Currently CERN is doing all of the work for the Itanium (ia64) support in Scientific Linux. This is because they have Itanium machines. CERN's hardware roadmap has them phasing out the few Itanium's that they use, and eventually getting rid of all of them. When this happens CERN will no longer support the ia64 port of Scientific Linux. We would like to phase out the itanium support at that time. This is not going to happen overnight, or in a few months, but it will happen. When it does, we do not want it to be a surprise to the Scientific Linux community. We have asked the High Energy Physic's community at the last two HEPIX conferences, if anyone will be affected, and both time's, nobody said that they would. We have also asked on scientific-linux-devel mailing list if there was anyone there that would be greatly affected. Although there was some concern, nobody had any objections. I am now bringing this to the main body of the Scientific Linux community. Is there a lab, university, or organization that not only needs Scientific Linux on ia64, but is also willing to support it? The main developers have all agreed that it's ok by us if ia64 goes away gracefully. We don't want ia64 hanging around if nobody is using it. But on the other hand, if someone needs it, and is willing to put forth the effort to support it, we will be willing to keep it in the distribution. For those that are wondering how many Itanium machines are using Scientific Linux, we have a statistics page that shows. This page is just numbers from the main ftp server, as such, it should only be used for percentages. https://www.scientificlinux.org/about/stats/arch.html As you see, only 28 Itanium machines are reported, out of 16,337 machines. If I further trim out fermilab, cern, and obvious mirrors, that number drops down to 18. That's alot of work for 18 machines. But, for all I know, one of those mirror's is actually for a site that has several thousand Itanium machines. And if that is the case, I want to make sure that we don't just drop them, which is why I am sending this e-mail out. Thanks Troy Dawson -- __________________________________________________ Troy Dawson [log in to unmask] (630)840-6468 Fermilab ComputingDivision/CSS CSI Group __________________________________________________