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FreeBSD/ia64 Project

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Introduction

The FreeBSD/ia64 project pages contain information about the FreeBSD port to Intel's IA-64 architecture; officially known as the Intel Itanium® Processor Family (IPF). As with the port itself, these pages are still mostly a work in progress.

Current status

The ia64 port is still considered a tier 2 platform. This boils down to not being fully supported by our security officer, release engineers and toolchain maintainers. In practice however the distinction between a tier 1 platform (which is fully supported) and a tier 2 platform is not as strict as it seems. In almost all aspects the ia64 port is a tier 1 platform.
From a developer point of view there's an advantage to have the ia64 port be a tier 2 platform for a while longer. We still have a couple of ABI breaking changes in the pipeline and having to maintain backward compatibility this early in a ports life is less than ideal.