Intel’s Itanium architecture was an interesting experiment, but it has gone down in history as one of the chip giant’s bigger flops, so much so that it earned the name “Itanic” in the tech press. This is perhaps unfair, considering it did limp on until a quiet EOL in 2020. We didn’t know anyone missed it, but perhaps it was more the technical challenge than nostalgia for obsolete server hardware that led [Yufeng Gao] and [gdwnldsKSC] to spin up an instruction-set translator for the late, lamented, IA-64 architecture.

Note that it’s very much in alpha, version 0.1, so don’t expect all the things. Neither HP-UX and OpenVMS will boot, which is a pity since Itanium’s great success was arguably winning those OSes and thereby killing the bespoke architectures HP and DEC had at the time. Gentoo can get to a shell, as long as you use Kernel 6.6 or older, and Windows Server 2003 and XP-64 both apparently boot.

It’s not incredibly performant, with 486-level speeds when running on Ryzen 5000 series hardware, but then, it is a 64-bit hardware being emulated here, and pretty weird hardware at that. Itanium’s Very Long Word Instruction architecture was notoriously hard to program well. Specifically, it was hard to compile optimized programs for, so we expect optimizing an emulator is going to be similarly difficult. That’s why this is so impressive, even at this early stage.

The late, unlamented Itanium is probably one of the few systems not in the Virtual OS Museum, but perhaps eventually this project will change that.

via Raymii.org