Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Peter Bergner <bergner@borg.umn.edu>]

First off, my apologies for posting this from my non-work email address.
>From my .sig below, you'll see I work for IBM, Rochester.


Rob Landley wrote:
: The AS400 seems to be based out of Austin.  We hear a lot about it around 
: here...

and...

Michael Meissner wrote:
: Ummm, the AS/400 was based out of Rochester, Minnesota at least initially.
[snip]
: Now that AS/400's are based on special PowerPC's, the home may have moved
: to Austin, which is the PowerPC/AIX center.

The AS/400 (now named iSeries) is and always has been produced in
Rochester Minnesota.  The RS/6000 (now named pSeries) is designed
in Austin.  Both the AS/400 and the RS/6000 are manufactured in
Rochester.  As of some model which escapes me now, both AS/400 and
RS/6000 computers use the *same* PowerPC processor.  The only
difference is that the AS/400 runs the processor in "tags active"
mode (ie, the 65th tag bit enabled).  The first PowerPC processors
used in the AS/400 was designed here in Rochester.  Follow-ons were
designed in Austin.


Kai Henningsen wrote:
: ISTR there's a gcc port for the AS/400.

Due to the fact that the AS/400 has 1 address space shared by all
processes, several restrictions have been implemented.  The main
restriction regarding your statement above is that *all* code that runs
on the AS/400 is compiled by the "trusted" translator (an exception
would be our Java JIT).  This means you cannot create a binary with gcc
and hope to run it on the AS/400.  However, you may use gcc to produce
MI instructions which can then be passed to the trusted translator.



Peter

--
Peter Bergner
SLIC Optimizing Translator Development / Linux PPC64 Kernel Development
IBM Rochester, MN
bergner@us.ibm.com