Itanium Lives: QEMU Fork Boots Windows XP on IA-64

Itanium is dead. Long live Itanium. A QEMU fork with workable Merced emulation can now boot Windows XP and Server 2003 on IA-64, and someone actually got it to install. The catch: you'll need to build a cross-compiler, compile firmware, and pray through multiple install attempts.

The QEMU Fork

Malte Kuhlmann's QEMU fork builds on syunnPC's AI-Itanium-infused work. The Merced branch targets the original Itanium processor, and it's good enough to run the 32-bit-era Windows XP IA-64 edition. The author notes that a merger of the two forks is likely, given how fast things move when they're interesting.

Building the Toolchain

Getting the emulator running starts with a cross-compiler. The author used binutils 2.46.0 and GCC 15.3.0, targeting ia64-linux-gnu. GCC 15 still supports Itanium, thanks to René Rebe's efforts to keep the architecture from being deprecated. Building on macOS required Homebrew for GMP, MPFR, and MPC, plus a workaround for a zlib fdopen conflict in zutil.h.

../gcc-15.3.0/configure \
  --target=ia64-linux-gnu \
  --prefix=/usr/local/ia64-linux-gnu \
  --disable-bootstrap \
  --disable-multilib \
  --enable-languages=c \
  --with-gmp=/opt/homebrew \
  --with-mpfr=/opt/homebrew \
  --with-mpc=/opt/homebrew

The build mostly works, but you'll need to manually copy libgcc.a and ignore missing pthread headers—Linux-only stuff that doesn't matter for firmware.

Emulator Setup

The QEMU build itself is straightforward: clone the merced branch, configure with --target-list=ia64-softmmu and Cocoa display, then make. The author hit a transient error that resolved on a second make run—par for the course with bleeding-edge emulation.

For the OS image, the author used the retail XP IA-64 ISO from the Internet Archive (MD5: 604ee3141ed6a34391a89a33c0019702), warning that many XP Itanium versions exist and it's easy to grab the wrong one.

Installation Roulette

Booting into the EFI firmware confirms the cross-compiled firmware works. The installer handles system partition creation like other EFI platforms—a nice change from RISC-era manual partitioning. File copying took under five minutes, but the graphical installer can crash or lock hard. The author needed five attempts, and never completed an install with syunn's fork. Once it works, the system runs, but arrow keys repeat too often, so RDP is recommended.

Success rate: 1 in 5. Not great, but the author notes things are improving fast.

What's Next

The obvious next target is Windows Server 2003 IA-64 (build 5.2.3790), which should be within reach given the same emulation groundwork. The author hints at future posts covering that.