IBM 86884RX Installation Guide - Page 113
Background, SGI, SuSE, Turbolinux, and VA Linux Systems now VA Software.
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4.3.1 Background The goal of the project to port the Linux kernel to the Itanium platform was to have a single optimized port of the Linux kernel for every Itanium-based machine. The kernel has been available at http://www.kernel.org since early 2000. The development model used to create this new porting of the kernel was the same as used for other Linux development work: open source developers working together around the world on a cooperative effort to bring it available before any other operating system and even before the official release of the processor itself. This is one of the key points of Linux' success, and also of this Itanium 2 port of the kernel. This effort was also possible thanks to many companies and institutions that contributed on this development effort, such as Intel, IBM, Caldera (now SCO Group), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Red Hat, SGI, SuSE, Turbolinux, and VA Linux Systems (now VA Software). Each company distributed the work among their developers to achieve the best results. The main tasks were: Port the kernel itself Initial port of GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to IA-64 architecture Port of GAS, emacs, ld, GNUPro toolkit Port of performance, measurement, and analysis tools Intel provided the IA-32 and IA-64 platform specifications and the EFI, and helped on the Apache port. The rest of the work was distributed among the companies involved, and also by private individuals around the world. Linux for IA-64 provides a new pure 64-bit kernel but maintains compatibility at the API level with Linux for x86 wherever this is possible. The error messages, the system signal, and the ioctl codes will remain as compatible as possible between the two platforms. Also in this version, as started in the Linux kernel from Version 2.1.126 onwards, developers tried to minimize changes to make the code as platform-independent as possible, while optimizing the platform-specific features to improve performance on Itanium processors. The IA-64 Linux kernel follows the standards defined by Intel and other companies. These include: EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) - see http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/ DIG64 (Developers Interface Guide for 64-bit Intel Architecture Servers) - see http://www.dig64.org Chapter 4. Installation 99
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