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Re: Debian on ia64 / HP Itanium servers



Hi Jesse,

Jesse Dougherty, on 2022-09-16:
> Hi, I'm Jesse.. I work for a company that sells HP hardware. We sell HP
> Itanium servers. I have a user that wants to buy a few servers and have
> Debian loaded on them. Can you tell me what versions of Debian are supported
> on ia64 / HP Itanium server platforms?

Short answer: none.

To the best of my knowledge, there is still a port alive of
Debian for ia64 architecture[1,2], but support is not official
in the sense of a "Release architecture"[3,4] for contemporary
Debian version 11 bullseye.  Given that we lost support for ia64
on kernel side[6], I don't expect future Debian versions will
support officially this CPU architecture again.

I believe the last Debian version to have had support for ia64
as release architecture was Debian 7 wheezy[6].  This version is
unmaintained for years, so wouldn't recommend it for any serious
use as it misses many security fixes.  Other option would be to
try to put a Debian unstable station together with resources
made available via ports[1,2].  None of these options sound
exactly suitable for sales, except to hobbyists knowing what
they are doing perhaps.

[1]: https://www.ports.debian.org/
[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/Ports/ia64
[3]: https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html
[4]: https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_policy.html
[5]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=228345bf98cd78f91d007478a51f9a471489e44a
[6]: https://release.debian.org/wheezy/arch_qualify.html

In hope this helps nonetheless,
-- 
Étienne Mollier <emollier@emlwks999.eu>
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Sent from /dev/pts/2, please excuse my verbosity.
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