The making of Linux/ia64

The IA-64 architecture, co-developed by HP and Intel, is going to reach market mid-2000 with Merced as its first implementation. Major indus- try players have endorsed this new architecture and technical details are gradually becoming publicly available. However, the complete architecture will not be fully disclosed until machines become avail- able. To provide for early availability of Linux on IA-64, in February 1998 HP Labs began a project to bring Linux to this new architecture with the even- tual goal of releasing it to the open source commu- nity. This paper gives an overview of the IA-64 ar- chitecture and describes our effort so far.