CNET News: Linux on Itanium Passes Milestone

“The Itanium version of Linux crossed an important threshold
Monday, developers said: It now can be built from the standard
software maintained by Linux leader Linus Torvalds rather than
requiring special patches.

“‘As of this morning, Linus’ current (kernel) builds and works
out of the box for ia64!’ Linux-Itanium leader David Mosberger, a
Hewlett-Packard programmer, said in a mailing list message. The
version uses Torvalds’ 2.5 development version of the kernel, or
heart, of Linux, which in coming months is expected to become the
2.6 version, which will be sound enough for real-world use.

“IA-64 is the former name for the set of instructions the
Itanium processor can understand. The fact that those instructions
are different from Intel’s widely used Pentium and Xeon processors
means that building an Itanium version of Linux–or any other
software–has its challenges…”

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