Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu alpha?

[J. Mayer]

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:
> > > Hi list!
> >
> > Hi you !
> >
> > > 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
- 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.
But the first step about the Alpha target would be to properly debug the
linux-user-mode emulation, that would validate the core CPU INSNS
emulation part.
I guess my Alpha CPU and ABI knowledge is too restricted to find the
problem of most program crashing for now. It seems to me that the Unique
register is not initialized properly, but this is just a guess and I
have no idea of what's going wrong with this register and what should be
its value.

-- 
J. Mayer <address@hidden>
Never organized