Linux on Itanium

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Red Hat

Red Hat Linux / Enterprise Linux
Initial release Red Hat Linux 7.1 - Kernel 2.4

Released mid 2001

Last release RHEL 5 - Kernel 2.6.18

Released 15 March 2007

Last major update RHEL 5.11 - Kernel 2.6.18

Released 16 September 2014

End of support Standard support - 8 January 2013

Security support - 31 March 2017

Extended support - 30 November 2020

Red Hat Linux

Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial Linux distribution, available for a variety of architectures from 1994 until its discontinuation in 2004.

Support for the Itanium platform was first announced on 16 February 2000 together with the release of some development tools.[1] This was followed up with the release of early source code in May 2000[2] and the release of a public beta in December 2000.[3] That beta release was for the 7.1 release of Red Hat Linux, running on the 2.4 Linux kernel.

The first commercial release was Red Hat Linux 7.1 was announced on 29 May 2001[4] and was available for purchase from sometime between June and August 2001 for the price of $499[5], more than 12x the price of standard Red Hat Linux at $39,95[6], 6x the price of Deluxe Workstation at $79,95[7], 5x the price of the Alpha Deluxe edition for the soon to be discontinued DEC Alpha platform priced at $99,95[8] and almost 3x the price of the Professional Server edition at $179,95.[9] Only the High Availability Server edition and the Enterprise Edition for Oracle were priced higher, costing $1995 and $2500 respectively.[10][11]

Red Hat Linux 7.2 was announced on 7 January 2001[12] and was released sometime around the end of 2001.[13] This version was discontinued sometime between June and September 2002[14][15] in favor of Red Hat Linux Advanced Workstation and Advanced Server for Itanium 2-based Systems.[16] This edition was initially only distributed through OEMs.[17]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the successor and continuation of Red Hat Linux under a new branding. It continues where Red Hat Linux Advanced Server and Advanced Workstation ended.

RHEL 2.1 for Itanium could be first purchased outside of OEM channels from mid 2003, starting at $792 for the Workstation (WS) variant and at $1992 for the Advanced Server (AS) variant.[18] In mid 2004 the Enterprise Server (ES) edition was also made available for Itanium during the lifetime of RHEL 3. RHEL 4 released in February 2005 was the last release to come with a WS (Workstation) edition for Itanium.[19] The last release of RHEL to support Itanium was 5, released in March 2007 and discontinued in March 2017, with Extended Lifecycle Support available until November 2020.[20]

Today RHEL 4 AS and ES, as well as RHEL 5 Server can still be downloaded from Red Hat with a developer or business subscription account.

SUSE Linux / SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Initial release SUSE Linux 7.2 - Kernel 2.2.19

Released 18 July 2001

Last release SLES 11 - Kernel 2.6.27

Released 24 March 2009

Last major update SLES 11 SP4 - Kernel 3.0.10

Released 16 July 2015

End of support Standard support - 31 March 2019

No extended support available

SUSE Linux

SUSE Linux, later SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is a Linux distribution intended for business customers. It is released in both a server and workstation edition for various platforms.

In order to assist developers in porting software to Itanium, SUSE announced free access to a compile farm with Itanium machines on 23 August 2000. A preliminary version of SUSE Linux 7.0 was released for free in the same announcement.[21]

On 29 May 2001, SUSE Linux announced that SUSE Linux 7.2 will be released for the Itanium architecture.[22] The actual release followed on 18 July 2001.[23] A release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 7 was announced on 20 December 2001 as well.[24]

For the Itanium 2 family, SUSE announced and released SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8 on 26 March 2003.[25]

The last version to be released for Itanium was SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 on 24 March 2009, with support ending on 31 March 2019. Long term support was not made available for the Itanium architecture.[26]

Debian GNU/Linux
Initial release Debian 3.0 (Woody) - Kernel 2.2

Released 19 July 2002

Last release Debian 7 (Wheezy) - Kernel 3.2

Released 4 May 2013

Last major update Debian 7.11 (Wheezy) - Kernel 3.2

Released 4 June 2016

End of support Standard support - 25 April 2016

Experimental builds - 09 Jun 2024

Debian

See also Debian (ia64)

Debian is a widely known and used free and open source Linux distribution available for a variety of architectures and machines. It is one of the oldest Linux distributions and due to its stability it is very popular for PCs and servers. It also is the base for many other Linux distributions like Ubuntu, LMDE and Proxmox.

Work on an Itanium-Release of Debian began in mid 2000 during the development phase of Debian 2.2 (Potato).[27] Development was mostly done on remote servers and the occasional SDV. The first stable release of Debian would be Debian 3.0 (woody), released on 19 July 2002. Releases continued until Debian 7 (Wheezy), being released on 4 May 2013.

In October 2013 a roll call revealed that there were no developers and maintainers left that would actively maintain the ia64 build of Debian,[28] resulting in the discontinuation in February 2014.[29] Thus Debian 7 (Wheezy) would become the last official release. Support officially ended with the end of life on 25 April 2016. Long Term Support (LTS) was not provided for this architecture.

In recent years some experimental builds of Debian were made for Itanium. However on 9 June 2024 the announcement was made that the ia64 architecture would be removed from the ports archive due to end of support of various upstream packages.[30] This effectively ended development on the (semi-)official ia64 port.

Ubuntu
Initial release Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) - Kernel 2.6.12

Released 13 October 2005

Last release Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) - Kernel 2.6.32

Released 29 April 2010

End of support Standard support - 9 May 2013

Extended support - 30 April 2015

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a popular free Linux distribution targeted towards consumers and business users alike. It is based of Debian and had its first releases in 2004.

Support for Itanium was in development since the beginning, with the first public release of the port being Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) on 13 October 2005.[31] Releases continued until Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on 29 April 2010, after which porting to ia64 was stopped for future releases due to the lack of active maintainers.[32] Support for it ended on 30 April 2015.

Ubuntu is noteworthy for being one of the few Linux distributions to ship both Desktop releases as well as Live CDs for its Itanium builds.

Many of the older Itanium releases are currently not available for download from the Ubuntu archives. They have been removed and mirrors seem to be rare. Also it seems that some non-LTS releases were skipped (such as 8.10).

Gentoo Linux
Initial release Gentoo 2005.1

Released 8 August 2005

Last release Gentoo 2024-04-04
End of support Rolling release - 07 Sep 2024

Gentoo

Gentoo is a rolling release Linux distribution first released in 2002. Its unique quirk is that the source code for every package is compiled locally during the installation. It is designed to be portable and thus supports a variety of architectures, including Itanium (ia64).

Development on ia64 support started around 2003 with a first running build being reported in September 2003.[33] The first experimental build to release stages for Itanium was 2004.3 released on 15 November 2004[34], followed by 2005.1 on 8 August 2005 being the first release with an InstallCD image.[35]

Since its move to becoming a rolling release in September 2008, Gentoo has been the longest continuously maintained Linux distribution for the Itanium architecture. Support was discontinued on 07 Sep 2024 due to ia64 support being dropped by the Linux kernel and glibc.[36]

Downloads

Red Hat

SUSE Linux

Debian

Ubuntu

Gentoo

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010605134758/http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2000/press_itanium-alpha.html
  2. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010605134758/http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2000/press_itanium-alpha.html
  3. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010620054747/http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2000/press_itanium2.html
  4. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20020606134425/http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press_itanium.html
  5. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010802120544/http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/7-1_itanium.html
  6. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010613205301/http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/7-1_standard.html
  7. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010613201242/http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/7-1_deluxe.html
  8. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20011031163454/http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/rhl7a_deluxe.html
  9. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010613204025/http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/7-1_professional.html
  10. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010620093351/http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/haserver/
  11. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20010620105948/http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/eeoracle/
  12. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20030602124754/http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2002/press_itanium.html
  13. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20020111065727/http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/7-2_itanium.html
  14. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20021012105520/http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2002/press_hp.html
  15. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20021001234753/http://www.redhat.com/software/itanium/
  16. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20030424053718/http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2002/press_hp3.html
  17. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20030401190804/http://www.redhat.com/software/itanium/
  18. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20030802121118/http://www.redhat.com/software/itanium/
  19. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20060630051556/http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/
  20. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Product_life_cycle
  21. ↑ https://www.suse.com/news/itanium_compilefarm/
  22. ↑ https://www.suse.com/news/72_ia64ships/
  23. ↑ https://www.suse.com/news/72_ia64ships/
  24. ↑ https://www.suse.com/de-de/news/ipf/
  25. ↑ https://www.suse.com/news/sles_ipf/
  26. ↑ https://www.suse.com/products/long-term-service-pack-support/
  27. ↑ https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2000/07/threads.html
  28. ↑ https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2013/10/msg00006.html
  29. ↑ https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2014/02/msg00000.html
  30. ↑ https://www.ports.debian.org/
  31. ↑ https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2005-October/000040.html
  32. ↑ https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2010-August/000441.html
  33. ↑ https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/3ed82cbe1a6da7ae2c4acd97e753c922
  34. ↑ https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RelEng/LiveCD/2004.3
  35. ↑ https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RelEng/LiveCD/2005.1
  36. ↑ https://www.gentoo.org/news/2024/08/14/Gentoo-drops-IA-64-support.html
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