Re: architectural goals, Byte Addressability And Beyond

John Dallman <jgd@cix.co.uk> schrieb:

In article <gf6l5jtdreabgsud0qss6fu0cs17udisdb@4ax.com>,
quadibloc@servername.invalid (John Savard) wrote:
>

If they took it to its logical conclusion, and packaged
zArchitecture chips without the ability to run current
IBM operating systems in the same way as POWER chips,
I might actually be interested.

>
A deskside zSeries machine that would boot and run Linux (probably under
z/VM) reasonably simply would be interesting to me. A big-endian machine
with comprehensive hardware trapping has software QA uses in the current
era of machines that hardly trap on anything apart from SEGV.

There are POWER8 machines on sale on E-bay, on which you can run
either Linux or AIX, and bigendian too, if you want.

I also have a login shell open on such a machine right now, but that's
on the gcc compile farm, which is only for open-source projects.

$ cat foo.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main()
{
  int a;
  char c;
  a = 0;
  c = 1;
  memcpy (&a,&c,1);
  printf ("%d\n", a);
  return 0;
}
$ gcc foo.c
$ ./a.out
16777216
$ uname -a
Linux cfarm203 6.0.0-6-powerpc64 #1 SMP Debian 6.0.12-1 (2022-12-09) ppc64 GNU/Linux