Re: [9fans] Anyone handy with Alpha assembler?

["Paweł Lasek" <pawel.lasek@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 19:56, Benjamin Huntsman
<BHuntsman@mail2.cu-portland.edu> wrote:
>>I think trap.c would be easier to work with or extend to other
>>instructions, l.s might give better performance.
>
> That was my concern as well.  The Alpha compiler doesn't optimize much.  Not that optimization is going to matter much on an EV4.

Well, even on EV4 it could matter. At least I don't remember Alpha
having any real cache-coherency (or memory coheency at all), also EV4
and EV5 which don't have BWX can get much higher speed from using
8-byte aligned data, as well as sticking to 64-bit data where
possible. All those masking operations are probably slowing the code
much.

> I've got the EBSDK, which was the PALCode developer's kit from the AlphaPC boards.  I don't think there's any pressing need to patch up the PALCode though.  The OSF/1 PALCode that Plan 9 runs with is already designed for UNIX-like systems.  Besides, since they're all implementation-specific, it'd be a bad idea to try to run the EBSDK PALCode on a GS-series machine, should anyone want to run Plan 9 on one in the future. :)

Well, the code for updating PALcode probably should be in bootloader
anyway, and HWPRB *does* report processor type, doesn't it? Patching
only "illegal instruction trap" should be enough. As for GS-series, at
my current job we still have some GS1280 (those were EV7z?) Pity I
wouldn't be able to play with those machines....

And could you share EBSDK? If the license permits, of course.

> -Ben
>



-- 
Paweł Lasek