Date: Wed, 08 May 2002 11:16:04 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG, Mark Santcroos <marks@ripe.net>, David O'Brien <obrien@FreeBSD.ORG>, Wilko Bulte <wkb@freebie.xs4all.nl> Subject: Re: *bsd on srm-less alpha's Message-ID: <3CD96B64.C9972706@mindspring.com> References: <XFMail.20020508081041.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
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John Baldwin wrote: > > Particularly in the VM system. With different microcode, you > > get digfferent machine instructions. FreeBSD relies on a > > number of instructions which act a particular way because they > > are implemented in the SRM that way. > > Umm, we use instructions from PALcode, not from SRM. Now I think SRM > contains certain versions of PALcode (VMS and Unix ones) whereas the > ARC stuff uses the NT PALcode. You would need to change more than VM > though. PAL is used for context switching and for enable/disable > interrupts, etc. Yes, of course. The VM system is (IMO) much harder to handle; the context switch can pretty much be treated as a black box, unless you try to be clever with lazy state switching. I made the mistake a while ago of trying to do this with the NT code (in fact, it was when I lived in Tucson, and could go down and talk to the Linux Alpha guys at the University there; late 1990's). While it would be nice to be able to run on all hardware because we were PAL code agnostic, it'll be quite a task, I think. That's not to discourage the effort; it's more to let anyone attempting the work know what it is they are getting into. I'm sure everyone who can will help, where possible (ambitious projects are always crowd-pleasers 8-)). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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