There are about 40 #ifdef directives which mention IA64. (See attachment.)

Recently a probable bug was noticed around line 150 of oop.inline.hpp,
in IA64-specific code: It looks like the length value is garbage.

On the other hand, another bug was fixed around line 1500 in graphKit.cpp,
as part of 6470497, which had earlier (2002/11/05) been fixed only in an IA64 ifdef.
Failure to backport this fix led to a customer VM crash.

In both cases, it would probably have been better to eliminate or
at least minimize the number and volume of IA64-specific #ifdefs.
(And other #ifdefs for other platforms, too!)

Somebody needs to make a pass through the sources and vigorously
rethink, rewrite, and remove the platform-specific #ifdefs in our code.