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  • Ard Biesheuvel's avatar
    arch: Remove Itanium (IA-64) architecture · cf8e8658
    Ard Biesheuvel authored
    The Itanium architecture is obsolete, and an informal survey [0] reveals
    that any residual use of Itanium hardware in production is mostly HP-UX
    or OpenVMS based. The use of Linux on Itanium appears to be limited to
    enthusiasts that occasionally boot a fresh Linux kernel to see whether
    things are still working as intended, and perhaps to churn out some
    distro packages that are rarely used in practice.
    
    None of the original companies behind Itanium still produce or support
    any hardware or software for the architecture, and it is listed as
    'Orphaned' in the MAINTAINERS file, as apparently, none of the engineers
    that contributed on behalf of those companies (nor anyone else, for that
    matter) have been willing to support or maintain the architecture
    upstream or even be responsible for applying the odd fix. The Intel
    firmware team removed all IA-64 support from the Tianocore/EDK2
    reference implementation of EFI in 2018. (Itanium is the original
    architecture for which E...
    cf8e8658