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Has anyone here ever used Windows NT on a DEC Alpha? A company in Ireland I worked for gave a mobile phone GIS demo to the Irish national phone company and Digital lent us a beefy server with two AXP CPUs (it was gonna be the future!) running windows NT. We literally pulled it on cobbled dublin streets on a a handcart to bring it to their offices.
Has anyone here ever used Windows NT on a DEC Alpha? A company in Ireland I worked for gave a mobile phone GIS demo to the Irish national phone company and Digital lent us a beefy server with two AXP CPUs (it was gonna be the future!) running windows NT. We literally pulled it on cobbled dublin streets on a a handcart to bring it to their offices.
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This was only 'enforced' by the linker on x86. You could handcraft a Mach-O executable to get around it. But it is now enforced enforced by OSX on ARM. I don't see any good reason for this. My own half assed explanation is they're enforcing 32b cleanliness. It's not a very good explanation. But it's my explanation for something I don't like.
When migrating 32bit apps to 64bit platforms, it's common to follow the recipe: 1. Try to recompile on 64bit without any changes 2. Realize the program does not work because the types have different sizes now 3. Cast everything on sight to types that have same size as in 32bit. 4. Now the program "works" (as in, it compiled and maybe ran but you didn't test thoroughly) This address space restrictions ensures that if…
Which is why on windows they defaulted to 32 bits for ints
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You didn’t need to handcraft it, the linker has a ‘pagezero_size’ argument which allows you to set it as small as one page and then the rest of the low 4GB can be used.
I remember trying this repeatedly with various incantations but always getting: segaddr blah conflicts with pagezero_size Maybe there was an incantation I didn't find. But I did handcraft it and then Apple cancelled even that. Now we're gonna have to deal with a 4GB zero page. Period.
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Wikipedia says it was only commercially available for NT4, I do somewhere have the Dec Alpha Windows 2000 beta discs (It got killed very late in the beta).
A friend of mine had an Alpha, and I was getting the Windows betas (I got 98se, 2000, and XP, and then nothing else). My friend was really happy to 'borrow' the win2k for alpha discs. IIRC, release candidates 1 and 2 had alpha discs, and then 3 and beyond didn't; but I might be off by one. I assume it would have shipped as part of the release if only Alpha was cancelled a couple months later.
> No. The virtual address space starts at the 64KB boundary. You can confirm this by calling GetSystemInfo and checking the lpMinimumApplicationAddress. It will be 0x00000000`00010000. Aw, man. I recently found out there is also a similar restriction on Linux. Bummer, because I have a good use for putting code into the lower 64KB of memory (not 4KB, still want to use that for catching NPEs). My use case is a fast i…
Made for some borked code with Clozure Common Lisp when people started running 64kB pagesize on PPC64, and that meant that even with minimal zero page it still was too big to map the "low memory" where CCL stuck it's NULL definition.
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PAL code didn't do anything like context switches and I'm not sure how it could, given how the OS needs to know the specifics of the thread context in many scenarios.
I believe in the specific case of L4/Alpha, the PALCode did perform the context switches. Granted, I doubt it was as robust as the VMS or Tru64 PALCode versions that were production-ready.
L4/Alpha PALcode was limited to specific set of CPUs it was implemented for, so unlike VMS, NT or Digital Unix PALcode it wasn't available outside of those few machines.
Has anyone here ever used Windows NT on a DEC Alpha? A company in Ireland I worked for gave a mobile phone GIS demo to the Irish national phone company and Digital lent us a beefy server with two AXP CPUs (it was gonna be the future!) running windows NT. We literally pulled it on cobbled dublin streets on a a handcart to bring it to their offices.
Has anyone here ever used Windows NT on a DEC Alpha? A company in Ireland I worked for gave a mobile phone GIS demo to the Irish national phone company and Digital lent us a beefy server with two AXP CPUs (it was gonna be the future!) running windows NT. We literally pulled it on cobbled dublin streets on a a handcart to bring it to their offices.
> That is a special page of memory that is mapped read-only into user mode from kernel mode, and it contains things like the current time, so that applications can get this information quickly without having to take a kernel transition. This page is at a fixed location for performance reasons. I didn't know there was a vdso-like mechanism in Windows as in Linux.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...