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Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage
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A modified Qemu fork now emulates the Itanium Merced core well enough to run the ia64 build of Windows XP/2003, supported by a freshly built cross-compiler toolchain.
This shows how legacy operating systems can be revived on obsolete hardware through community-maintained emulation, giving engineers a way to test low-level software without rare physical machines. It also reveals the effort required to adapt modern build tools to a dead target, highlighting the hidden costs of keeping cross-compilation environments alive for abandoned architectures.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
A fork of Qemu with workable Itanium Merced emulation was used to boot Windows XP/2003.
Building an ia64-linux-gnu GCC 15.3.0 toolchain required patching a duplicate fdopen definition in zutil.h and manually copying libgcc.a after encountering a missing pthread.h header.
The build process stops at those specific errors unless the source is edited and the library is supplied, after which the toolchain can compile firmware and Qemu can start the Windows XP image.
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What the cluster adds up to.
A fork of Qemu now provides functional emulation of the Itanium Merced core, allowing the ia64 build of Windows XP/2003 to run in a virtual machine without needing physical Itanium hardware.
To produce a usable toolchain the author compiled binutils 2.46.0 and GCC 15.3.0 for the ia64-linux-gnu target, encountering a duplicate fdopen definition in zutil.h and a missing pthread.h header, which required editing source files and manually copying libgcc.a before the build could finish.
The compilation halts at the fdopen macro error and the missing pthread.h include unless the developer comments out the offending line in zutil.h and supplies the missing library, indicating that the build process is blocked by these specific issues.
Once the patches are applied and the environment variables are set, the resulting ia64-linux-gnu GCC can compile firmware for the emulated Itanium, and the Qemu instance is able to boot the Windows XP ia64 image, demonstrating a working legacy-software stack on obsolete hardware.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · checked for specifics the sources never containedTHE CLUSTER