Subject:
Re: Alpha emulator?
From:
Keith Cayemberg <keith.cayemberg@arcor.de>
Date:
Sun, 05 Jun 2005 16:04:29 +0200
Newsgroups:
comp.os.vms

Michael wrote:

> We've had great success with the Charon VAX emulator,
> but we need an Alpha emulator.  Is there a commercial
> or open source Alpha emulator available?  If so, I
> would appreciate it if you could give me a point of
> contact.
>
> Thank you, Michael
>
Hi Michael,

there are several Alpha Emulators out there, but most (or maybe all of them) are missing additional layers needed to boot OpenVMS. These would be the firmware, SRM, Console and PAL Code layers that provide atomic operations and services which the bare Alpha hardware doesn't provide. I only know of one Alpha Emulator which has booted OpenVMS. It was developed and used by OpenVMS Engineering in the early porting of OpenVMS to Alpha. I don't believe it is available to the public, or packaged in a form that would be amenable to use by persons without unreserved access to the same hardware and individuals who created it. If you are willing to wait until Intel-based Servers achieve the same performance advantage over Alpha as now enjoyed over the VAX, I suppose then someone will then develop and sell a commercial VMS Alpha Emulator solution. Until then most of us commercial or hobbyist users will be best served by the available new or used hardware (VAX, Alpha or Itanium) or one of the VAX emulators, in terms of the price/performance equation. Even a very well-implemented Alpha Emulator on any other currently available single CPU is not likely to provide more performance than a cheap, used Alpha System.

Here are the Alpha Emulator links which I have collected...

*Alpha Emulator Links*

Alphaahb4 - Alpha CPU emulator (may not run any interesting Os) - SAIC
http://mvb.saic.com/freeware/vmslt03a/vu/

AINT - Alpha interpreter - University of Colorado at Boulder
https://systems.cs.colorado.edu/DistributedSoftware/Aint/

DEC Emulation Website
http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/decemu.html

DEC Alpha Emulation Webpage
http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/Alpha.html

DECUServe VMS Conference 3411.1 - Alpha Emulator Posting
http://www.encompasserve.org/DECUServe/DECnotes/VMS/3411.1.HTML

M5 Simulator System
http://m5.eecs.umich.edu/

SimCore/Alpha Functional Simulator
http://www.yuba.is.uec.ac.jp/~kis/SimCore/functional.htm

Simics - The Virtutech Simics full system simulation platform
https://www.simics.net/

SimOS
http://simos.stanford.edu/

SimOS - HP WRL Page
http://www.research.compaq.com/wrl/projects/SimOS/

SimpleScalar LLC
http://www.simplescalar.com/

SimpleScalar - SimpleScalar Fixes & Improvements for Alpha
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plakal/simplescalar/

SMTSIM - Multithreading Simulator - UCSD
http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/tullsen/smtsim.html



*VAX Emulator Links*

CHARON-VAX
http://www.softresint.com/charon-vax/index.htm

Dave Airlie's "mirror" network driver (for local loopback to SIMH) - Linux/VAX Porting Project
http://linux-vax.sourceforge.net/download/index.html

DEC VAX Emulation
http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/vax.html

eVAX - Forest Edge Software
http://www.forest-edge.net/evax.html

Graham Toal's - VmsEmulator Page
http://gtoal.com/software/VmsEmulator

SIMH - Computer History Simulation Project - Bob Supnik
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

ts10 - FTP Archive - Timothy Stark
ftp://ftp.firesword7.net/pub/ts10/develop

ts10 - SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ts10/

VAX Emulator Services extend application life - Google
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.os.vms/msg/e4ea54a9226b95f9

VAX/VMS on Linux using SIMH
http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html


Cheers!

Keith Cayemberg