[Info-vax] Are any Itanium firmware versions still legally available for free ?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-01-29 14:01:27 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> The objective was a full system emulator hosted under Linux, not an 
> image level translator like Ski currently does for Linux Itanium 
> binaries.

A hypothetical emulator will usually emulate the hardware and the 
firmware, in a fashion similar to the emulation of VAX and its control 
store, and of Alpha and its PALcode.

AFAIK, the existing VAX and Alpha emulators do not embed that firmware.

VLIW won't be any fun to emulate on a non-VLIW box and with any sort of 
performance, but that's a more general issue.

Running the instructions within bundles across cores in parallel would 
be "fun" to synchronize.

If you're pondering this path, also ponder using an FPGA as a potential 
implementation option.

http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~jhoe/doku/doku.php?id=fpga_prototyping_and_emulation_of_computer_systems 



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