Re: [Qemu-devel] [Patch] Ali Chipset support for PC [+ questions about alpha-softmmu target]

[Tristan Gingold]

On Sep 9, 2008, at 5:53 PM, Brian Wheeler wrote:

> Hello!
>
> Long time listener, first time caller...
>
> Since the ES40 Alpha Emulation project seems to have stalled, I've  
> been
> looking at what it would take to get QEmu to a state where it could
> emulate an alpha machine.

Hi,

I had the same idea too.  Qemu should be much faster than es40 emulator.

> The es40 is basically a PC with an alpha chip instead of an x86 and it
> uses the Ali1543C south bridge.   This basically is a copy of  
> piix_pci.c
> so the chipset reports the ALI vendor and device codes to qemu when  
> the
> "alipc" machine type is selected.
>
> I've booted Knoppix and it seems to work ok...which is no surpise
> considering how minor the changes are.
>
> So, now to the questions:
> * Is anyone else working on a softmmu target for the alpha?

I plan to work on it.  But first I have to finish the TCG conversion  
of target-alpha.

> * What state is the alpha cpu emulation in, and what's the best way to
> test it?

Still beta.  It was not maintained nor tested for a while.  And bugs  
were recently found.

> * Looking over some of the softmmu targets, it looks like the bulk of
> target work (after the cpu emulation, of course) is just attaching all
> of the devices in the right places.

Booting might be an issue too as alpha boots from icache.
It looks like es40 has an IO-TLB which is not present in standard  
PC.  I suppose Sparc64 has also
an IO-TLB but I didn't look further.

Tristan.