Linux IA-64 Resource Portal

djmagic writes "SourceForge has opened it's IA-64 portal for porting projects to Linux running on (surprise) IA-64. " It's still a tad sparse, but you should be able to compile on the Compilefarm if you're interested in porting something. There's also a news.com story on the thing.

Comments

Some questions answered and some you haven't asked

[chrisd]

Hi All, I wanted to note some things for developers interested in using this service. First, since sourceforge only caters to OSS projects, it is limited to OSS only.

I did want to go over the NDA that you have to click through to use the service. Why the NDA? Intel is letting us use IA-64 engineering samples for the compile farm and they don't think that any public benchmarking done on engineering samples is fair. We agreed with them and wanted to see developers get thier hands on a working sample early. You're welcome to disagree, but we wanted to give a heads up to people, so be sure to read the NDA.

Intel has been pretty cool about this, I am pretty happy to see the GPL liberally sprinkled around an Intel legal document.

Some points from the NDA (most of the NDA is Intel covering its butt, limitation of liabilities and such):

In paragraph 3 Intel says the following (and this applies to paragraph 5,8 as well):

• "You may not reverse engineer, decompile, license or disassemble portions of any Intel Software provided in object code form."

• The only code that is from Intel in object code form is the BIOS and motherboard controller firmware. There is no other object code on the system. The IA-64 Linux kernel is completely open and has been out of NDA and licensed under the GPL since February.

Paragraph 4 is the Benchmarking Clause.

Paragraph 13, this is a tricky thing, they retain the right to receive activity logs of the compile farm, this is so they can verify for Paragraph 4. They are only able to request logs pertaining to the Compile Farm, not any other sections of the site.

Finally we ask for a brief description of the work you want to perform, this is because we (VA/Sourceforge) may have to throttle usage based on project importance. The persons judging this is Eric Sindelar here at VA. We really don't think we'll have to throttle usage, but we want to have the info available to do so if in fact we need to. As of this writing we already have 30 requests to use the service, so it shouldn't be all that necessary.

That is the overview that we've come up with, we hope that this will go a long way in finding out any IA-64 issues that your code may have. This will also be good for checking the IA-64 Linux Kernel out in real world conditions. If you have any other questions, pose them here and we'll answer them, or email me directly

Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems

--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG