alpha 21174 chipset (and later ones too i guess) has quite neat hardware
scatter-gather support. Eg a whole pile of reprogrammeable window's, with a
TLB to cache window lookups, (last 4 or 8 lookups IIRC). So there's no
reason why in the case of Alpha it can't support all the hardware i386 does.
in fact it should be able to handle silly hardware better as we could easily
assign a window to exactly suit 'bad' hardware.
Related: the standard reply to "howto get 4GB on intel" is usually "don't
bother, get a 64-bit machine".. that's bogus - cause of the current direct
PCI -> RAM address mapping Alpha actually supports *less* RAM than i386, ie
2GB.
It'd solve a lot of problems if this could be implemented. Anyone working on
it?
(and how much is involved?)
regards,
Paul Jakma
paul@clubi.ie
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