Red Hat heeft bekend gemaakt dat het een pre-production versie van haar IA-64 Linux distributie heeft gereleased. Developers die in bezit zijn van een Itanium devbak kunnen de beta release gebruiken om zachte goederen voor Intel's nieuwe IA-64 platform tot onwikkeling te brengen. Daartoe is de beta versie voorzien van de Red Hat / Cygnus compiler en toolkit. Deze is gebaseerd op het werk van het Trillian project, waar onder andere Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM en Silicon Graphics in deelnemen. Genoeg vertaald , hier heb je de complete press release:
Red Hat, Inc. announced today the availability of an early release of the Red Hat source code for the forthcoming Intel Itanium processor platform targeting high-end servers and workstations. This distribution enables the development of IA-64 software for the most intensive computing environments, from high performance design automation to enterprise level databases. A free download version of the code can be obtained at ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/ia64.``Red Hat's release of pre-production tools and software represents an important milestone in the development of the IA-64 Linux platform,'' said Michael Pope, Intel's director of e-Business Solutions Marketing. ``This release will enable the open source Linux community to accelerate their development of advanced server and workstation applications for Itanium processor based systems.''
Intel recently announced the availability online of the Itanium Processor Microarchitecture Reference, a guide for software developers that details the functional behavior of Intel's Itanium microprocessor. This guide, together with the Red Hat code will enable developers to create programs that will be Red Hat/IA-64 ready before the production release of the Itanium microprocessor.
``Commercial developers know that as the principle source of the GNU development tools for both IA-32 and IA-64 Linux, (as well as for many proprietary operating systems), Red Hat is positioned to help developers port and optimize their applications for IA-64 Linux,'' said Michael Tiemann, CTO, Red Hat, Inc. ``We believe this will be especially valuable to developers who want to extend their Linux-based offerings into high-end, 64-bit enterprise and technical computing markets.''
This pre-production version will include the Red Hat/Cygnus compiler and tool kit. It is based on the tools and kernel developed by the Trillian project, a group of companies that include Red Hat, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Caldera, CERN, SuSE, TurboLinux and SGI. The full release of Red Hat's offering will coincide with the IA-64 hardware availability from Intel.
``We continue to work closely with Red Hat, Intel and our strategic independent software vendors (ISVs) to speed development of 64-bit e-commerce solutions that are optimized on Dell systems,'' said Bob Van Steenberg, vice president and general manager of enterprise server products in Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. ``As a world leader in Internet commerce and infrastructure products, Dell is on track to be among the first to deliver to its customers Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell Precision WorkStations based on Intel's 64-bit Itanium processors.''