[fpc-devel] progress of freepascal for mips

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

microcode at zoho.com wrote:

> I am near certain IBM doesn't make any MIPS hardware at all and never has
> in their history. In the past they've made all sorts of odd things but at
> the moment all they make is Intel and POWER servers, as far as servers go.
> MIPS in IBM-speak is "millions of instructions per second" which is how
> they describe mainframe performance since they don't publish clock speeds.

That's my understanding as well.

>> If I can install an hypervisor, I could create one virtual machine to let
>> the FPC team test the MIPS version on this machine, it can be online 24/7.
> 
> Virtualization is thin to none on anything but Intel hardware. But there is
> QEMU and it provides support for various architectures including MIPS.

Agreed. However larger SPARC systems can, I believe, be divided into 
multiple domains, and larger IBM PPC systems can be partitioned into 
LPARs. I don't have practical experience of either of these 
technologies, but if Leonardo's been told "there's a system on its way 
to you and we expect you to use its virtualisation facilities" and if 
it's non-x86 then that's the sort of thing he's likely to have to 
contend with.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]