Re: IBM S/370 and binutils

["David and Jannette Uczen" <uczen at mint dot net>]

I have already registered EM_S370 (9) with SCO. It should appear in the new
ABI.

There should be no problem using EM_S370. In all the header files I have
seen, EM_S370 has either had the correct value (9) or has been reserved.

The IBM System/370 Processor family has a long history, dating back to the
early 1960's. Each new processor is fully upwards compatible with all
previous chips. Although they were primarily water-cooled through the late
1980's, the latest generations, the System/390 processors, are air-cooled
CMOS microprocessors. There are even boards (P/390) that fit and run in PC's
at about 9 MIPS. The current "mainframe" versions (actually they are about
the size of a coke machine now) come with 1 to 12 processors, run at up to
1000+ MIPS, and have up to 32MB of memory.

The S/370 is a 16 register, 32-bit processor, however, IBM is expected to
release a 64-bit version in mid to late 2000. The current version now
support IEEE floating point. The S/370 is a big-endian machine.

Amdahl (I forget his first name), one of the developers of the S/370
processor, left IBM and started Amdahl Corporation and began manufacturing
S/370-compatible processors, much like AMD makes x86-compatible processors.

In the late 1980's, Amdahl developed UTS, a SVR4-compliant operating system
that runs on S/370 and compatible processors. They assigned EM_S370 (9) as
an ELF machine type, although SCO has no record of this. As I said earlier,
this value is now registered.

With this in mind, I think it would be inappropriate NOT to use EM_S370.
Besides only having one machine value for a particular processor (which I
believe is a goal of ELF), it would also facilitate porting GNU projects to
the UTS operating system.

Sorry for the long-winded blurb on S/370, but I thought you might want a
little background.

--David



-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Lance Taylor <ian@zembu.com>
To: linas@linas.org <linas@linas.org>
Cc: uczen@mint.net <uczen@mint.net>; binutils@sourceware.cygnus.com
<binutils@sourceware.cygnus.com>; linas@linas.org <linas@linas.org>
Date: Friday, October 29, 1999 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: IBM S/370 and binutils


>   Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 11:50:28 -0500 (CDT)
>   From: linas@linas.org
>
>   > -----Original Message-----
>   > From: Ian Lance Taylor <ian@zembu.com>
>   > To: uczen@mint.net <uczen@mint.net>
>   > Cc: binutils@sourceware.cygnus.com <binutils@sourceware.cygnus.com>
>   > Date: Wednesday, October 27, 1999 7:40 PM
>   > Subject: Re: IBM S/370 and binutils
>   >
>   >
>   > >   From: "David and Jannette Uczen" <uczen@mint.net>
>   > >   Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 19:22:49 -0400
>   > >
>   > >   I am forwarding this message to inform the binutils developers
that I
>   > >   believe that any further use of the ELF machine type EM_I370
(0xF00F)
>   > should
>   > >   be discontinued.
>
>   I picked this value in the absence of any other suitable value.
>   There is no formal ELF ABI that would specify such a value,
>   although I have been working on & off with folks inside of IBM
>   (the TJ Watson research center) to create such an ABI.  Clearly,
>   among the first steps would be to designate a machine type.
>
>   Please let me know who I should contact to get this (and also,
>   a type for the binary format) reserved in the most suitably
>   official manner possible.
>
>Talk to registry@sco.com.  They maintain the lists of official ELF
>machine numbers.  They'll give you a number if you ask, although
>sometimes you have to ask a few times.  It may help to pull in
>somebody from IBM; they seem to take big companies more seriously than
>free software people.
>
>First, though, is there some reason that it is inappropriate to use
>EM_S370?  I don't know anything about the 370, so that may be a stupid
>question.
>
>Ian
>
>