Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu alpha?

[J. Mayer]

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 !
Current status is alpha-linux-user is able to launch some executable.
Unfortunately, all the one I got crash after some time, probably because
the unique register is not initialized properly. And I got no Alpha
machine to be able to compare what's going wrong in the emulation code.
The softmmu Alpha support is far from being usable for many reasons.
First of all, I started to code a PALcode host-side emulation but it
still needs a lot of work before being usable. The second thing is I
don't really know which CPU model is the best to emulate first and I
don't have the precise specification of the hardware platform to be able
to code the needed hw/alpha.c file.
If you feel like helping developping the Alpha target support, I think
the first target would be to work on the linux-user mode, which mostly
needs debug and bugfixes. Once the core CPU will be validated, the
softmmu suport could be done too.
I can of course help you doing this, if you need advices or support,
having started the target as an invitation for Alpha specialist to make
it really usable.
Then, your help and knowledge is welcome here !

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