On 10/21/2007 12:43 PM, Rob Landley wrote: > On Saturday 20 October 2007 3:56:12 am J. Mayer wrote: >> On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 19:49 -0500, Rob Landley wrote: >>> On Sunday 14 October 2007 5:14:27 am J. Mayer wrote: >>>> On Sun, 2007-10-14 at 11:19 +0200, Oliver Falk wrote: >>>>> Just wanted to know how far the progress on alpha target is? I would >>>>> be happy if I have some 'virtual alpha' to test new isos. >>>>> >>>>> If I can help some way (I have a few alphas around). Let me know. >>>> I'm happy to see someone interresting in improving Alpha support, which >>>> is .... very alpha for now ! >>> I'm interested in testing Alpha too, but I haven't seem a >>> qemu-system-alpha show up yet. Alas, I have no hardware or specific >>> expertise in this platform, I'm just trying to build and boot Linux >>> kernels (and corresponding root filesystems) on as many emulated target >>> platforms as I can. >> There are a lot of things missing for qemu-system-alpha to be available: >> - the PALCode emulation is far from being complete or even usable > > I have no idea what that is. > >> - there is no hardware machine emulation for Alpha in Qemu. >> As I have no Alpha platform, I don't know much about the hardware to be >> emulated. > > I do know that the ev6 bus is the same as the Athlon used.
And what about ev5 or ev56? Well ev6 or ev67 should be the main target to be emulated I think... > When Compaq bought the corpse of DEC back in the mid-90's, they weren't > interested in their chip designers, so AMD scooped up most of the Alpha > design team. AMD then asked them "ok, if you guys were going to design an > x86 compatible processor, what would it look like?" The result was the > Athlon back around 1997. You could actually stick one in an Alpha > motherboard, and the only reason it wouldn't boot is the bios was alpha > machine language instead of x86 code. Everything else was the same, because > it's what the designers were familiar with. Duh. That's new to me - didn't know that yet. > So if you slap an Alpha in a virtual x86-64 PC motherboard, you're not too > far > off. > > Here's one spec: > http://web.archive.org/web/19990913123756/http://www.unix-ag.org/Linux-Alpha/Architectures/LX164.html Thanks for those informations! -of