alpha, operations involving non-finite numbers or denormalised numbers
or operations which should generate such numbers will cause an arithmetic
exception. For programs which follow some strict code generation rules,
the kernel trap handler can then 'complete' the operation by emulating
the faulting instruction.
To use software completion, a program must be compiled with the arguments
'-mtrap-precision=i' and '-mfp-trap-mode=su' or '-mfp-trap-mode=sui'.
Programs compiled in this way can use non-finite and denormalised numbers
at the expense of slightly less efficient code generation of floating
point instructions. Programs not compiled with these options will receive
a SIGFPE signal when non-finite or denormalised numbers are used or
generated.
Reviewed by: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>
* Support for AlphaStation 200, 250, 255, 400
* Untested support for UDB, Multia, AXPpci33 (Noname)
* Support for Personal Workstation 433a/433au, 500a/500au, 600a/600au (Miata)
* Some minor fixes and improvements to interrupt handling.
Submitted by: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> (AS200, Miata)
Obtained from: NetBSD (some code for AS200, Miata, Noname)
* Eliminate bus_t and make it possible for all devices to have
attached children.
* Support dynamically extendable interfaces for drivers to replace
both the function pointers in driver_t and bus_ops_t (which has been
removed entirely. Two system defined interfaces have been defined,
'device' which is mandatory for all devices and 'bus' which is
recommended for all devices which support attached children.
* In addition, the alpha port defines two simple interfaces 'clock'
for attaching various real time clocks to the system and 'mcclock'
for the many different variations of mc146818 clocks which can be
attached to different alpha platforms. This eliminates two more
function pointer tables in favour of the generic method dispatch
system provided by the device framework.
Future device interfaces may include:
* cdev and bdev interfaces for devfs to use in replacement for specfs
and the fixed interfaces bdevsw and cdevsw.
* scsi interface to replace struct scsi_adapter (not sure how this
works in CAM but I imagine there is something similar there).
* various tailored interfaces for different bus types such as pci,
isa, pccard etc.
work in progress and has never booted a real machine. Initial
development and testing was done using SimOS (see
http://simos.stanford.edu for details). On the SimOS simulator, this
port successfully reaches single-user mode and has been tested with
loads as high as one copy of /bin/ls :-).
Obtained from: partly from NetBSD/alpha
