Intel’s Itanium structure was an attention-grabbing experiment, but it surely has gone down in historical past as one of many chip big’s greater flops, a lot in order that it earned the identify “Itanic” within the tech press. That is maybe unfair, contemplating it did limp on till a quiet EOL in 2020. We didn’t know anybody missed it, however maybe it was extra the technical problem than nostalgia for out of date server {hardware} that led [Yufeng Gao] and [gdwnldsKSC] to spin up an instruction-set translator for the late, lamented, IA-64 structure.
Notice that it’s very a lot in alpha, model 0.1, so don’t anticipate all of the issues. Neither HP-UX and OpenVMS will boot, which is a pity since Itanium’s nice success was arguably profitable these OSes and thereby killing the bespoke architectures HP and DEC had on the time. Gentoo can get to a shell, so long as you utilize Kernel 6.6 or older, and Home windows Server 2003 and XP-64 each apparently boot.
It’s not extremely performant, with 486-level speeds when operating on Ryzen 5000 collection {hardware}, however then, it’s a 64-bit {hardware} being emulated right here, and fairly bizarre {hardware} at that. Itanium’s Very Lengthy Phrase Instruction structure was notoriously onerous to program nicely. Particularly, it was onerous to compile optimized applications for, so we anticipate optimizing an emulator goes to be equally tough. That’s why that is so spectacular, even at this early stage.
The late, unlamented Itanium might be one of many few methods not within the Digital OS Museum, however maybe finally this venture will change that.
by way of Raymii.org
