News is bubbling up both from the Gentoo project and its successor, the tellingly named "Funtoo" – what Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins did next.
RIP Funtoo – Advice for switching from Funtoo to Gentoo
The source-based Gentoo Linux distribution, which still supports a wide range of CPU architectures, will soon support a smaller one. The project leaders announced that they are removing support for Intel's Itanium processor family.
It had little choice in this. Like all other distros, Gentoo relies on upstream support for a platform to function. The Linux kernel almost removed Itanium support in February 2023 and finally did so in kernel 6.7 last October. As we predicted the following month, no one has stepped up to maintain support outside the tree.
That was followed earlier this year with confirmation that GCC 15 would also drop Itanium support. While distros with fixed release cycles can hold things back a bit longer – for example, antiX Linux 23 still offers the option of kernel 4.9 – this is not true for a rolling release distro like Gentoo, which is based on the ever-changing current upstream code. Even though GCC 15 isn't out yet, once a CPU architecture isn't supported in either the kernel itself or the compilers used to build a kernel, it's a really hard block for Gentoo to support Itanic.
