In July of 2022, I acquired two workstations with processor architectures I had long had my eye on. The first was a Sun Blade 150, featuring an UltraSPARC IIe processor, on which I promptly installed Solaris 10. The second was a Compaq AlphaStation DS10, with an Alpha 21264A processor. Rather than one of Digital or Compaq’s proprietary operating systems, I decided to go with a Linux distro, first installing Gentoo and later, Debian, as I had several projects in mind to experiment with, and a proper Linux install would make them much easier to carry out.
This article was originally part of “Fixing a 16+ Year Old Bug in Linux for DEC Alpha With Only One Line of Code”, but as the two subjects are only tangentially related, I figured this deserved its own treatment. This article is the first bit in what I hope I can make into a running series - much information about the DEC Alpha software ecosystem and what makes it all tick is either trapped in old manuals or, more often than not (doubly so in the case of the Linux port), was never properly documented.
Back in ~June of 2021, I began porting clang and LLD (and by extension, LLVM) to Silicon Graphics' IRIX operating system. It was my first time ever hacking on any compiler or linker, and even though I was flying blind a lot of the time, it was incredibly interesting, and I learned a lot from the process. Along the way, I wrote a series of forum posts over on IRIXNet which described my progress as well as bugs I ran into while enabling IRIX support.
Back in ~June of 2021, I began porting clang and LLD (and by extension, LLVM) to Silicon Graphics' IRIX operating system. It was my first time ever hacking on any compiler or linker, and even though I was flying blind a lot of the time, it was incredibly interesting, and I learned a lot from the process. Along the way, I wrote a series of forum posts over on IRIXNet which described my progress as well as bugs I ran into while enabling IRIX support.
Back in ~June of 2021, I began porting clang and LLD (and by extension, LLVM) to Silicon Graphics’ IRIX operating system. It was my first time ever hacking on any compiler or linker, and even though I was flying blind a lot of the time, it was incredibly interesting, and I learned a lot from the process. Along the way, I wrote a series of forum posts over on IRIXNet which described my progress as well as bugs I ran into while enabling IRIX support.
Back in ~June of 2021, I began porting clang and LLD (and by extension, LLVM) to Silicon Graphics' IRIX operating system. It was my first time ever hacking on any compiler or linker, and even though I was flying blind a lot of the time, it was incredibly interesting, and I learned a lot from the process. Along the way, I wrote a series of forum posts over on IRIXNet which described my progress as well as bugs I ran into while enabling IRIX support.