Re: [Valgrind-developers] headaches abound.. platform support

[Greg C. <cha...@wi...>]

Thanks for the honest feedback on this one..
I have my DEC alpha architecture books (ev3/ev4), and they give 
everything I would need, but they were published in 1992, which means 
they are for the 21064 and the pre-production ev3, and nothing later.  
Which sadly would only get me started.
There are 6 newer architectures for alpha (ev45,5,56,6,67,7) all of 
which have way more advanced stuff than the original chips.

It appears I should have looked into this a decade ago.. :(



On 2025/06/10 11:52, Paul Floyd via Valgrind-developers wrote:
> On 6/10/25 07:56, Tom Hughes via Valgrind-developers wrote:
> 
>> On 10/06/2025 00:30, John Reiser wrote:
>> It looks like just about every platform except alpha is supported,
>> so how much work is it to get a new platform supported (not sure how
>> much needs to be added/modified)?
>> 
>> Choose a supported $ARCH with 64-bit words and fixed-width
>> instructions:
>> 
>> $ grep -i arm64 $(find valgrind -name '*.[ch]')  |  wc -l
>> 5214
> 
> That's also a serious underestimate as there are whole files that
> are processor specific, like the basic CPU emulation:
> 
> Even counting for the fact that amd64 has probably more instructions
> than arm64, in VEX I see
> 
> $ cloc *arm64*c *arm64*h
> 
>  github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 2.04  T=0.04 s (153.5 files/s, 800954.5
> lines/s)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Language                     files          blank        comment
>     code
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> C                                4           2113           5552
>    22130
> C/C++ Header                     2            157            282
>     1072
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> SUM:                             6           2270           5834
>    23202
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> You will need to know the Alpha Reference Manual inside-out (about
> 1000 pages). If you are not already an expert in Alpha machine code
> then you will need to be very dedicated and be willing to spend a
> substantial amount of time working in it.
> 
> For reference, much of the Solaris amd64 port was does done for a
> masters thesis (typically 1 year). And that didn't require adding
> amd64 support.
> 
> Then there's the regression tests. We have over 100 amd64 tests. arm64
> is a bit weak, we only have 20 tests. Several of these are huge tests
> that use a python script to generate extensive coverage for opcodes
> with different register/memory modes.
> 
> A+
> 
> Paul
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