Also from the thread: > None of the original companies behind Itanium still produce or support any hardware or software for the architecture, and it is listed

Also from the thread: > 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 EFI was developed, and the way Linux supports it deviates significantly from other architectures.) ... > There are no emulators widely available, and so boot testing Itanium is generally infeasible for ordinary contributors. GCC still supports IA-64 but its compile farm no longer has any IA-64 machines. GLIBC would like to get rid of IA-64 too because it would permit some overdue code cleanups.