Hello Ard!
Can I take that as an ack on [0]? The EFI subsystem has evolved substantially over the years, and there is really no way to do any IA64 testing beyond build testing, so from that perspective, dropping it entirely would be welcomed.
ia64 is regularly tested in Debian and Gentoo [1][2]. Debian's ia64 porterbox yttrium runs a recent kernel without issues: root@yttrium:~# uname -a Linux yttrium 5.19.0-2-mckinley #1 SMP Debian 5.19.11-1 (2022-09-24) ia64 GNU/Linux root@yttrium:~# root@yttrium:~# journalctl -b|head -n10 Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: Linux version 5.19.0-2-mckinley (debian-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) (gcc-11 (Debian 11.3.0-6) 11.3.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.39) #1 SMP Debian 5.19.11-1 (2022-09-24) Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: efi: EFI v2.10 by HP Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: efi: SALsystab=0xdfdd63a18 ESI=0xdfdd63f18 ACPI 2.0=0x3d3c4014 HCDP=0xdffff8798 SMBIOS=0x3d368000 Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: PCDP: v3 at 0xdffff8798 Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: earlycon: uart8250 at I/O port 0x4000 (options '115200n8') Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: printk: bootconsole [uart8250] enabled Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: ACPI: Early table checksum verification disabled Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: ACPI: RSDP 0x000000003D3C4014 000024 (v02 HP ) Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: ACPI: XSDT 0x000000003D3C4580 000124 (v01 HP RX2800-2 00000001 01000013) Nov 14 14:46:10 yttrium kernel: ACPI: FACP 0x000000003D3BE000 0000F4 (v03 HP RX2800-2 00000001 HP 00000001) root@yttrium:~# Same applies to the buildds: root@lifshitz:~# uname -a Linux lifshitz 6.0.0-4-mckinley #1 SMP Debian 6.0.8-1 (2022-11-11) ia64 GNU/Linux root@lifshitz:~# root@lenz:~# uname -a Linux lenz 6.0.0-4-mckinley #1 SMP Debian 6.0.8-1 (2022-11-11) ia64 GNU/Linux root@lenz:~# EFI works fine as well using the latest version of GRUB2. Thanks, Adrian
[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/ [2] https://mirror.yandex.ru/gentoo-distfiles//releases/ia64/autobuilds/