On Thu, 9 Jan 2025, 08:19 Eric W. Biederman, <ebiederm@xmission.com> 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~