A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
a day ago
- A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator version 0.1 has been released, capable of booting Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit for Itanium.
- The emulator was developed by Yufeng Gao with assistance from gdwnldsKSC, achieving a breakthrough in non-x86 CPU emulation, though it runs slowly at performance levels comparable to a 486 on modern hardware.
- Current limitations include no support for OpenVMS, HP-UX, Linux, or BSD, but future development may expand compatibility, with hopes for OpenVMS emulation.
- The code is not open source yet but is planned to be cleaned up and made available on GitHub; there is also a mention of a QEMU fork that can run Server 2008 and uses LLMs.
- Itanium architecture was historically used for HP-UX and OpenVMS, but these have largely migrated or declined, with Windows on Itanium not being widely used in practice.