"The Itanium architecture is obsolete, and an informal survey reveals that any residual use of Itanium hardware in production is mostly HP-UX or OpenVMS based. The use of Linux on Itanium appears to be limited to enthusiasts that occasionally boot a fresh Linux kernel to see whether things are still working as intended, and perhaps to churn out some distro packages that are rarely used in practice.

None of the original companies behind Itanium still produce or support any hardware or software for the architecture, and it is listed as 'Orphaned' in the MAINTAINERS file, as apparently, none of the engineers that contributed on behalf of those companies (nor anyone else, for that matter) have been willing to support or maintain the architecture upstream or even be responsible for applying the odd fix.
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There are no emulators widely available, and so boot testing Itanium is generally infeasible for ordinary contributors. GCC still supports IA-64 but its compile farm no longer has any IA-64 machines. GLIBC would like to get rid of IA-64 too because it would permit some overdue code cleanups. In summary, the benefits to the ecosystem of having IA-64 be part of it are mostly theoretical, whereas the maintenance overhead of keeping it supported is real.

So let's rip off the band aid, and remove the IA-64 arch code entirely. This follows the timeline proposed by the Debian/ia64 maintainer, which removes support in a controlled manner, leaving IA-64 in a known good state in the most recent LTS release. Other projects will follow once the kernel support is removed."

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