Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu alpha?

[Oliver Falk <oliver@linux-kernel.at>]

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