Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/09/07/15:54:52
Nate Eldredge wrote:
> Incidentally, I have heard that various people working under temporary
> NDA's are already porting GCC to the Merced, so when the Merced comes
> out, GCC may already work on it.
Cygnus signed an agreement with Intel to add IA64 support to gcc, at least my
sources says that.
> > Word from Microsoft is that they will not be able to get
> > a 64-bit version of Windows out until ~2003, and it will be a complete re-write
> > (because of the large penalty for executing 32-bit code on the Merced
> > processor).
>
> "Complete rewrite" sounds unlikely to me. There is already NT for the
> Alpha, and I doubt it was a complete rewrite.
Related to the thread: Microsoft have an NT that runs over Merced, was presented in
an expo. some months ago. Of course: the Merced chip is emulated, not a real one, is
some emulator from Intel.
> The 32-bit code can be got rid of just by recompiling, and I doubt the
> architecture differences require *that* much work. But I suppose it's
> possible that Microsoft's code is so screwed up that it really is
> necessary...
And I think this theory (so screwed up ...) is wrong. M$ did a lot of things wrong
in NT, but also did a lot of things in the right way. They need to rewrite *only*
the HAL, the rest of the kernel doesn't use any architecture dependant stuff. No
direct I/O, no direct protection mechanism, nothing, all is done using the
HAL=Hardware Abstraction Layer, and that's one of the reasons because NT is so slow.
SET
--
Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET). (Electronics Engineer)
Visit my home page: http://welcome.to/SetSoft or
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/6552/
Alternative e-mail: set-soft AT usa DOT net set AT computer DOT org
set AT ieee DOT org set-soft AT bigfoot DOT com
Address: Curapaligue 2124, Caseros, 3 de Febrero
Buenos Aires, (1678), ARGENTINA Phone: +(5411) 4759 0013
- Raw text -