Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

A QEMU fork now supports Itanium Merced emulation well enough to run Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 on IA-64. The post walks through building a GCC 15 cross-compiler targeting ia64-linux-gnu on macOS (Apple Silicon), including workarounds for a zlib/fdopen conflict and missing pthread headers, then building the QEMU fork and installing Windows XP Itanium from an archive.org ISO. Installation success rate is roughly 1-in-5 attempts, taking 30-40 minutes on an M4 Mac Mini. Windows Server 2003 and an early 2001 build also install successfully, though other OSes like HP-UX and VMS do not yet work.

Source: https://virtuallyfun.com/2026/08/03/windows-xp-2002-for-the-itanium-unbridled-rage. 8sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.