The push to save Itanium

m68k has reasonably accurate emulators (aranym since way back, later qemu as well); itanic does not. I know about ski(1); it's not usable for kernel work. The minimal requirement is that breakage caused by a patch on real hardware (UP, no drivers involved, etc.) would be possible to catch using emulator. Without that you can't test; back when I had walked into arch/ia64 with some work (signals and kernel threads - nothing model-specific involved) I ended up having to buy a real box just to be able to do testing.

I'm not blaming emulator folks, BTW - the architecture is much more convoluted than e.g. alpha.