“To provide additional vehicles for pre-silicon validation and
post-silicon debug of the Intel Itanium[tm] processor, we ported
two operating system kernels to the IA-64 architecture. The Mach3*
microkernel was ported first, followed by the Linux* 2.2.0 kernel,
and these have helped track the overall health of the Itanium RTL
model for the last two years. These operating system (OS) kernels
also helped pre-silicon performance analysis and compiler-generated
code analysis.”
“The Mach3 kernel (the IA-64 port was called Munster internally)
was ported because it contained features similar to Microsoft
Windows NT*, such as tasks, threads, interprocess communication
(IPC), and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). Mach3* allowed us to
exercise parts of the Itanium model in a similar way to Microsoft
Windows NT, but at a reduced scale and without device support.”
“Linux (the IA-64 port was called IPD-Linux internally) was
ported because its source is readily available and 64-bit clean, it
is highly configurable, and it would exercise the model in a
different way than Mach3. We started with a released 2.2.0
version of the source and ported the kernel using a non-GNU C
Compiler (GCC). The difficulty of porting the Linux kernel without
GCC made the task more challenging.”