GCC 15 to keep Itanium support for now, after all

Now, can someone come up with an emulator for the things, please?

Good news, everyone – well, everyone who's still onboard the Itanic, anyway. GCC 15 will de-deprecate Linux support for Intel's original 64-bit chip.

The development team of the GNU Compiler Collection has accepted a code patch from hero developer René Rebe of Berlin-based ExactCODE, with the crowd-pleasing announcement:

The following un-deprecates ia64*-*-linux for GCC 15. Since we plan to support this for some years to come.

All right, it may be a very small crowd, but the point stands. As such, we are happy to issue a correction for our April article: GCC 15 will still support building programs for Itanium boxes. So long as they are running Linux, anyway; if you're still on HP-UX or OpenVMS, this is somebody else's problem.

GCC 15 is not out yet; the current version is still GCC 14.2. Also, this is just the GNU C compiler. It doesn't mean that you can build new versions of the Linux kernel. Kernel 6.7 dropped in-tree Itanium support and it still doesn't look like it's coming back.

Intel stopped making IA-64 processors years ago, and even stalwart supporter HP no longer sells new Itanium-based hardware, but if you have some of them still in production and running Linux, then GCC will still be able to compile binaries for them.

What would be even more useful, we suspect, would be a FOSS emulator that could run IA64 virtual machines. (Not to be confused with "x64" or "i64", both of which we've seen used as vexatiously ambiguous shorthands for x86-64 or AMD64). IA64 emulation has been done in the past, for instance by Simics [PDF]. There's also a partial CPU emulation in the form of HP's "ski" instruction set emulator, and there is limited guidance on using it. There's also an emulator for Windows binaries. We reckon there's potential here for any emulation fans to win (very limited quantities of) fame and acclaim. ®

Bootnote

This is not the first correction to our earlier story: Initially, we misread the announcement as applying to GCC 14, which we corrected to GCC 15.