A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows (raymii.org)

What's even crazier is that someone vibe-coded ia64 emulation support for QEMU: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64

“It runs quite slowly, (486-levels of performance on a Ryzen 5000 series according to this discord channel)”

I’m sure there’s a joke about that being a huge leap in performance for Windows on IA-64 over the past 23 years waiting to be made from this.

Neat I did this on real hardware twenty plus years ago. Also tried Debian, iirc. My memory is that the workstation perf was decent but the thing was loud and used a lot of power. x86 emulation was slow. The nick, Itanic was mostly deserved.

The Itanic was built specifically by HP to sink Fujitsu, hitachi, nec, unisys and sgi. So in that sense it was a success.

When it comes to Itanium all I can think of is how I wish I could have an Alpha. And how no one should care about Itanium.

It’s the product of companies bent on doing all the wrong things.

I have a funny story about a windows IA-64 box.

I was working for a large bank and it was all windows, including production. We used to run WebSphere Application Server on Windows. I was looking for a dev server to run unit tests on, including integration tests which required an actual WebSphere instance. The infrastructure team said they had “a box” going spare and it turned out to be IA64 on Windows.

If my memory serves me correctly WebSphere only ran on windows for IA-64 up to 6 and we were running on 7.

I had to do a bit of hacking but I did manage to get it working using the dlls from the 6 version. It was fine for running integration tests and a pretty fast box considering.

HP-UX support might make a compelling retirement project for someone.

OpenVMS ran on the Itanium also; wonder how far it could get in booting?

It would make sense to implement it in QEMU instead. There was some previous work in the past, don't have a link right now to the original patchseries, but here is the repository[1]. In theory, it could be adapted to the modern QEMU code infrastructure and APIs and be a good starting point. Back in the past I started[2] doing that but quickly dropped because had no time to finish.

EDIT: It looks like it might be this one: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64

[1] https://github.com/pvaibhav/qemu-ia64

[2] https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64/branches/all

This is much harder problem than most CPU emulators as IA-64 isn't really just another ISA. EPIC most significantly allows the RE which seems like the main implementation challenge. Does the emulator model the RSE or are there shortcuts for Windows compatibility? Also, which Windows model is booting?