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Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1999 11:20:49 -0300
From: salvador <salvador AT inti DOT gov DOT ar>
Organization: INTI
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: WARNING: DOS is about to die.
References: <7quo1t$94k$1 AT solomon DOT cs DOT rose-hulman DOT edu> <37D2ECE3 DOT 9BB2B63E AT unb DOT ca> <37D46EBF DOT 22AAC1C4 AT hmc DOT edu>
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

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

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