On Thu, 9 Jan 2025, 08:19 Eric W. Biederman, <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't think it is correct to think about 32-bit binaries on alpha.
Alpha never had a 32bit instruction set. But at some point it looks
like binaries that could not handle more than 31 bits of address
space got ported and someone implemented a work-around. I guess this
is the --taso option that Arnd mentioned
It's worse than that.
There was a Spec benchmark (I forget which) which was memory bound and ran twice as fast with 32-bit pointers.
I copied the idea from DEC to the ELF abi, but never did all the other work to allow the toolchain to take advantage.
Amusingly, a later Spec changed the benchmark data sets to not fit into a 32-bit address space, specifically because of this.
I expect one could delete the ELF bit and personality and no one would notice. Not even the 10 remaining Alpha users.
r~
