Gentoo Linux was one of the last few Linux distributions continuing to maintain Itanium (IA-64) architecture builds but that is now being phased out for those discontinued Intel processors.
Due to the Linux 6.7 kernel having dropped Itanium IA-64 support, the GCC compiler removing Itanium support, and other pieces of the open-source toolchain / software stack eliminating Itanium IA-64 support, Gentoo Linux didn’t have much of a choice. Plus they have very few users who have expressed themselves for actually relying on Gentoo IA-64 support.
Following a mailing list discussion and vote by the Gentoo Council, the Gentoo Linux project is discontinuing all IA-64 profiles and keywords. In the first half of September all the Gentoo IA-64 profiles will be removed, all IA-64 keywords dropped, and all IA-64 related Gentoo bugs will be closed. The decision was announced today on the Gentoo project site.
Given though that there were very few users of Gentoo IA-64 in recent years and Gentoo developers didn’t even have a functional development box, it’s unlikely to be missed. Other Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, SUSE Linux, and others have had their support for IA-64 deprecated years ago.
