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The FreeBSD/ia64 project pages contain information about the FreeBSD port to Intel's IA-64 architecture; officially known as the Intel Itanium® Processor Family (IPF). As with the port itself, these pages are still mostly a work in progress.
The ia64 port is still considered a tier 2 platform. This boils down
to not being fully supported by our security officer, release engineers
and toolchain maintainers. In practice however the distinction between
a tier 1 platform (which is fully supported) and a tier 2 platform is not
as strict as it seems. In almost all aspects the ia64 port is a tier 1
platform.
From a developer point of view there's an advantage to have the ia64
port be a tier 2 platform for a while longer. We still have a couple
of ABI breaking changes in the pipeline and having to maintain backward
compatibility this early in a ports life is less than ideal.
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This page tries to be the starting point for people trying to find anything that can be done. The order of the items on this page are not strictly an indication of priority, but it is a good indication. There are in all likelyhood tasks that are not mentioned here, but that should be done nonetheless. A typical example is the maintenance of the ia64 web pages... unfortunately.
With two releases as a tier 2 platform, it is time to work towards becoming a tier 1 platform. This involves tasks as varied as:
A very important task for the success of FreeBSD on ia64 is making sure that users have something to run besides ls(1). Our huge ports collection has been targeting ia32 for the most part, so it is not surprising that there are a lot of ports that do not build or do not work on ia64. Look here for the most up-to-date list of ports that fail to build for some reason or another. Note that if there are ports depending on one or more ports that fail, those are not built and are not counted. A good way to help out here is to work on those ports that have a lot of ports depending on it (see the "Aff." column in the table).
There are plenty functions (especially assembly routines) that have been written to provide the missing functionality without any consideration for speed and/or robustness. Reviewing those functions and replacing them if necessary is a good task that can be done concurrently and independently from other activity and does not necessarily require huge amounts of knowledge and/or experience.
On top of the high-level things that do not work or do not exist, there is also some rather involved rewriting to be done at the foundation and can potentionally affect all other platforms as well. This includes: