Microsoft Announces End of the Line For Itanium Support

WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has announced on its Windows Server blog the end of its support for Itanium. 'Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010 will represent the last versions to support Intel's Itanium architecture.' Does this mean the end of Itanium? Will it be missed, or was it destined to be another DEC Alpha waiting for its last sunset?"

Comments

Re:Not Very Comparable

[cbhacking]

The POSIX NT subsystem (and Interix, the user-space software that runs in the subsystem) have existed for a very long time, possibly all the way back to pre NT 4. The NT kernel doesn't actually use Win32 (or Win16, DOS, or Win64) system calls; it uses NT system calls,w hich are a superset of the functionality in all of those, plus the functionality required for OS/2 and POSIX. For example, the NTCreateFile system call not only implements the Win32 CreateFile system call (as seen in Win9x) but also the OpenFile system call (Win16) and the open system call (POSIX). For each API that NT supports, there is a user-mode DLL that translates the API-specific system calls (such as open(2)) to NT system calls (such as NTCreateFile()). These are then passed to ntdll.dll, which executes the actual system call (invoking ring-0 kernel code).

The OS/2 subsystem was discontinued years ago, but the POSIX one is still supported. From XP forward, it's been possible to enable the POSIX subsystem and download pre-compiled libraries, shells, utilities, headers, build toolchain (optionally using GCC or MSVC), manpages, and so forth to produce a working, if somewhat bare-bones, UNIX-like environment. Initially called OpenNT and now known as Interix, various third parties have provided additional functionality such as package managers (apt, portage, pkgsrc, or one specifically for Interix from http://suacommunity.com/ ), additional shells, libraries, utilities, X servers, and more.