[Feature request] ia64-softmmu wanted

[Jakub Jermar]

Qemu is missing support for full system emulation of the Itanium architecture, which is one of the main non-x86 server architectures today (despite the alleged decline in popularity). It would be really nice if someone had interest in adding full ia64 support to Qemu. Many OS projects could then use Qemu as the universal machine emulator for development and testing.

Note that there is an open source Ski simulator which can emulate an ia64 CPU, memory and a couple of Ski-specific devices, but the project seems inactive and the simulated machine is too simplified (no real devices, no real firmware). Moreover, it'd be better to have one tool such as Qemu for all architectures of interest rather than one per each architecture.

[Jakub Jermar (jakub)]

It may be actually easier to start with recreating the Ski machine inside QEMU. The result will be a faster Ski in a maintained codebase. Definitely not a bad start.

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (glaubitz)]

Someone is working on it, see: https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64

[Peter Maydell (pmaydell)]

The QEMU project doesn't implement new target architectures or board models on demand based on wishlist requests; they're a lot of work to do. Instead we simply code-review and incorporate board models and architectures as and when people decide to write them and submit the patches. So there's really no point in having a 'wishlist' bug in the bug tracker saying "support for board X would be nice", because it will never happen, unless by the coincidence that somebody happened to implement and submit it to us anyway.

So I'm going to close this bug as "Won't Fix"; if anybody happens to want to work with upstream on implementing this board model they are welcome to do so -- the mechanism for that is to email qemu-devel (with plans, requests for advice or patches).