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From: Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: architectural goals, Byte Addressability And Beyond
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2024 13:32:40 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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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