I was ultimately able to find some documentation over here: http://www.roma1.infn.it/SIC/_OLD_documentazione/unix/migr/digital-unix-doc/DOCUMENTATION/HTML/AA-PY8AC-TET1_html/TITLE.html
but I was suprised at how hard it was to find. I think the other ISAs are probably not too hard to maintain since they have (to my knowledge) a decent amount of documentation out there, but I guess Alpha was too proprietary in its day, and too far dead for there to be much of any grass roots open source-ey documentation and support out there for it. I think for Alpha, the support effort and the likelihood of breaking something while trying to maintain it blind may have tipped it into the not worth it category. Gabe On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 10:20 AM Steve Reinhardt <ste...@gmail.com> wrote: > It would be sad for me personally but I don't disagree. I think earlier > our support for other ISAs was not as strong so Alpha was still valuable, > but now that we have support ranging from very good to great for ARM, x86, > and RISC-V, it's hard to justify continuing to put effort into it. > > Steve > > > On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 9:32 AM Jason Lowe-Power <ja...@lowepower.com> > wrote: > > > Hi all, > > > > Does this hint at the fact that maybe we don't need to have support for > > Alpha anymore? If we can't find documentation I feel like it's unlikely > > anyone is using this. > > > > I hate to bring this us again, but dropping support for uncommon ISAs > would > > provide a lot of benefits including: > > - Simplifying code > > - Removing untested and/or dead code > > > > And, most importantly, it would prevent people from doing inappropriate > > research. There were recently some questions on gem5-users or stack > > overflow asking for help getting an ancient Alpha disk image with Parsec > on > > it running. There's no way it's appropriate to use a disk image, kernel > > image, and benchmarks compiled ~10 years ago for research today. > > > > <Ducks and covers>, > > > > Jason > > > > On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 9:21 AM Steve Reinhardt <ste...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > > If I have anything it's on the hard drive of a machine that needs some > > work > > > before it will even boot, sorry... > > > > > > > > > On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 11:19 PM Gabe Black <gabebl...@google.com> > > wrote: > > > > > > > Hey, does anybody have some documentation tucked away somewhere which > > > > documents the Alpha ABI? I don't seem to have that anywhere, and the > > > > internet isn't being very helpful. > > > > > > > > Gabe > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > gem5-dev mailing list > > > gem5-dev@gem5.org > > > http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev > > _______________________________________________ > > gem5-dev mailing list > > gem5-dev@gem5.org > > http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev > _______________________________________________ > gem5-dev mailing list > gem5-dev@gem5.org > http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list gem5-dev@gem5.org http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
