[Simh] AXP Emulation?

[Brian Wheeler]

On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 19:33 +0100, Peter Lund wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 11:20 -0500, Brian Wheeler wrote:
> > Does anyone know of an alpha system emulation for Linux?  SRI's is only
> > for Windows and doesn't run under wine :(
> 
> I just googled a bit -- I didn't find anything particularly
> interesting :(
> 
> On the other hand, the CPU itself is very simple to emulate.  

Yeah, it does look that way.  I've been doing some 'light' reading on
the alpha arch reference handbook, and I've requested the Alpha
architecture reference manual from the campus library (a bonus to being
at a uni!)


> You will
> have to choose a chipset -- Pyxis is probably not too hard.  Should be
> possible to implement it within perhaps six months for a single person
> working part-time.  That probably won't be enough time to make it fast
> or nice -- just enough to make it work.  Just getting /something/ up and
> running should be much faster.
> 

I started playing with this the other day, and I've been implementing
instructions as the bootstrap needs them :)   

The Firmware is a bit of an issue, though.  The images from hp don't
seem to be in any sort of usable format:  they're not rom dumps (that I
can tell, since they contain no text)   I've been using Linux's bootlx
from aboot as a bootloader.  It steps through about 26 instructions
until I end up at a call_pal halt.

Brian

> -Peter
> 
>