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I didn't know there was any. Oddly enough the Itanium has a pretty active Linux community - check out gelato.org. Frankly it has been such a niche market anyways that I didn't think anyone still bothered releasing any new software for it other than dedicated open source guys who were recompiling everything they could get source code for (since that is what you use 90% of your actual time for on an Itanium anyways - compiling software).

Quite simply, I'd be surprised if anyone who used Oracle on an Itanium actually cared about new releases.

I hate to break up a good pizza party, but I've been wondering if LLVM and Clang might help rescue Itanium as hinted by this 2005 paper which suggests a few compiler enhancements to help Itanium.

The article seemed pretty light on details of what MCA Recovery actually does. I found this presentation in PDF format that seems to go into some more useful detail about what this is. It's not just ECC to repair single-bit errors (although that is part of it, apparently). It also includes features to recover from errors that cannot simply be corrected. For example it includes a mechanism to notify the OS of the details of an uncorrectable error, so that it could presumably re-load a page full of program code from disk, or terminate an application if its data has been corrupted, instead of shutting down the whole machine.

ext3: 8TB total, 4TB files
ext4: 32 zettabyte (1024*1024*1024 TB), 1 exabyte files (1024*1024 TB)

Are they just going to work on improving the 8TB paper limitation, or are they actually trying to improve on ext3 scalability? Which, currently tends to suck the big one, especially on a significant number of disks (eg: http://scalability.gelato.org/DiskScalability/Resu lts).

I also seem to keep coming up against a pretty hard 2TB block device limit in Linux (eg LVM2 lv size, LUN size for fibre attached SAN, etc). I don't really know what the reasons for it are, anyone know what technologies allow for larger single partitions?

Anyway, I've long ago settled on reiserfs (3) for speedy random access to small files, and XFS for file server type applications; though I still wonder why RedHat doesn't include any "enterprise" filesystems by default in their "enterprise" products (I know, I know, you can enable it - I did say "by default").

Yes, but the difference is that on Itanium you can explicitly tell the CPU to rotate its register file. The result effectively is register renaming, and it can be used for software pipelining. See e.g. slide 7 of http://www.gelato.org/pdf/Workshops/geneva05/compi ling_itanium_muthu.pdf.

Just a couple of minor notes...

P2 was a PPro with MMX, which was *not* basicaly a Pentium. Notably, the PPro used a RISC core and could translate CISC, while the Pentium was straight CISC, and you could run 4 PPros - which you could only run up to two Pentiums (or first-gen PIIs, for that matter). The PPro was also optimized for 32-bit apps, while the Pentium actually outperformed on 16-bit apps at the same clock speed. Otherwise, your lineage is simplistically accurate... :)

Itanium hasn't been a giant success largely because of software screw-ups - it took a while for compilers to properly optimize for the CPU, and programmers failed to think of it as being a different CPU than their P3 or Xeon. Lots of x86 stuff just didn't (some still doesn't) build well for ia64 (Itanium), while it may still work well on the more similar em64t (Xeon). Ia64 is a really cool architecture, it's just not yet fully exploited. http://www.gelato.org/ and http://www.ia64-linux.org/ are good starting points for Linux-oriented information on that arch...

The new architecture in Itanium is a great opportunity for the open source community to innovate not just immitate.

Check it out.