2025-11-02 –, A112 Language: English
Intel Itanium (also called IA-64) is a now discontinued high-performance processor architecture based on explicitly parallel instruction computing (EPIC), a form of very long instruction word (VLIW) design. Since its removal from the Linux kernel mainline in 2023, it has been successfully maintained out-of-tree by a small but dedicated community.
This talk explores what it entails to keep Linux on Itanium up to date: motivation (including some background about the architecture itself), infrastructure, organization, and technical challenges involved. We’ll look at the current state of the project in 2025 — and wrap up with a live demonstration of what Linux (and Itanium) can still do today.
I'm a software engineer based in Brno, with a master's degree in theoretical computer science of Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University.
Currently, I work at Red Hat on real-time latency testing on Linux systems.