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I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source) emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation. Is the CPU architecture so complicated? Is it so undocumen

I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source) emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation. Is the CPU architecture so complicated? Is it so undocumented? I would think that projects like MAME have in the past reverse-engineered and emulated much more complicated and undocumented systems (some of which were even encrypted). So why don't we have any Itanium emulators yet?

pram 4y ago
It doesn’t really run anything interesting, I’d guess. PA-RISC HPUX can be run on qemu already, if you want the ancient crappy HP flavored UNIX experience for some reason.
toast0 4y ago
I'd guess there's no motivation for an Itanium emulator, because there's no exciting application or system that was exclusively for Itanium. MAME emulates a host of odd things because fun games run on those odd things and people would like to play those without having the hardware. You can run AIX on lots of hardware, so running it on emulated Itanium wouldn't be very fun.
als0 4y ago
Part of the reason is that Itanium hardware has always been expensive. You need the full hardware to compare against (not just CPU but also to test firmware and OS). A number of years ago I was interested in kickstarting QEMU development for it by building on the existing work and adding a new virtual platform. But HP Itanium hardware in Europe is still prohibitively expensive for me and disappears quickly.
cbmuser 4y ago
> I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source) emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation. There is actually some work on adding ia64 emulation support to qemu, see: > https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64 https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64
- IntelMiner 4y ago
  There is something deeply amusing about Itanium setting out to be Intel's new flagship 64-bit architecture before sinking under its own weight into niche use by effectively just HP Ten rendered irrelevant by their own competitor, AMD releasing "AMD64" (x86_64) a few years later Now fast forward 20~ years into the future and we're building emulators for Intel's dead 64-bit platform to run atop effectively AMD's 64-bit answer to it
  - nullc 4y ago
    Itanium is responsible for the best graph on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#/media/File:Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#/media/File:Itanium_Sa...

pram 4y ago

It doesn’t really run anything interesting, I’d guess. PA-RISC HPUX can be run on qemu already, if you want the ancient crappy HP flavored UNIX experience for some reason.

toast0 4y ago

I'd guess there's no motivation for an Itanium emulator, because there's no exciting application or system that was exclusively for Itanium. MAME emulates a host of odd things because fun games run on those odd things and people would like to play those without having the hardware. You can run AIX on lots of hardware, so running it on emulated Itanium wouldn't be very fun.

als0 4y ago

Part of the reason is that Itanium hardware has always been expensive. You need the full hardware to compare against (not just CPU but also to test firmware and OS). A number of years ago I was interested in kickstarting QEMU development for it by building on the existing work and adding a new virtual platform. But HP Itanium hardware in Europe is still prohibitively expensive for me and disappears quickly.

cbmuser 4y ago

> I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source) emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation. There is actually some work on adding ia64 emulation support to qemu, see: > https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64 https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64

IntelMiner 4y ago
There is something deeply amusing about Itanium setting out to be Intel's new flagship 64-bit architecture before sinking under its own weight into niche use by effectively just HP Ten rendered irrelevant by their own competitor, AMD releasing "AMD64" (x86_64) a few years later Now fast forward 20~ years into the future and we're building emulators for Intel's dead 64-bit platform to run atop effectively AMD's 64-bit answer to it
- nullc 4y ago
  Itanium is responsible for the best graph on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#/media/File:Itanium_Sales_Forecasts_edit.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#/media/File:Itanium_Sa...