Linux 6.7 Set to Drop Support for Itanium IA-64

Since 2021 the Itanium IA-64 code was orphaned in the Linux kernel and over the course of this year there's been talk of retiring the Itanium code from the kernel, a.k.a. strip it out. There is also a build fix so at least Linux 6.6, which is expected to be this year's Long Term Support kernel release will at least have IA-64 support in good standing should anyone actually use it. Removing the IA-64 support from the Linux kernel lightens the codebase by 65k lines of code. "The Itanium architecture is obsolete, and an informal survey reveals that any residual use of Itanium hardware in production is mostly HP-UX or OpenVMS based. The use of Linux on Itanium appears to be limited to enthusiasts that occasionally boot a fresh Linux kernel to see whether things are still working as intended, and perhaps to churn out some distro packages that are rarely used in practice." None of the original companies behind Itanium still produce or support any hardware or software for the architecture, and it is listed as 'Orphaned' in the MAINTAINERS file, as apparently, none of the engineers that contributed on behalf of those companies have been willing to support or maintain the architecture upstream or even be responsible for applying the odd fix....There are no emulators widely available, and so boot testing Itanium is generally infeasible for ordinary contributors. "So let's rip off the band aid, and remove the IA-64 arch code entirely. This follows the timeline proposed by the Debian/ia64 maintainer, which removes support in a controlled manner, leaving IA-64 in a known good state in the most recent LTS release. Other projects will follow once the kernel support is removed." Barring any surprises, the Itanium IA-64 removal will happen for Linux 6.7.