B.1 System Hardware

Quite modest configurations will support a class of undergraduates because the code examples from this book take up little disk space and consume very few CPU cycles. Several approaches would be feasible, depending on cost, availability, and organizational policies. We outline options here for actual hardware and for simulated environments.

B.1.1 Itanium Workstation or Server

You can use a dedicated Itanium-based system as small as a workstation, local to your own department. Alternatively, you can use a shared general purpose server located elsewhere within your organization.

Intel Corporation maintains a Web page with the names of vendors actively marketing Itanium-based systems:

http://developer.intel.com/buy/wtb/wtb1008.htm

Used systems will also become available over time, as newer products displace them.

By choosing to study the Itanium architecture using a command-line, rather than graphical, environment (see Appendix A), learners can accomplish every task in this book using their own personal computers, an available remote Itanium system, telnet, and ftp. See Section B.3 for suggestions about client software.

B.1.2 Ski Simulator on an IA-32 Linux System

A much less expensive foundation for learning would involve installing Ski and NUE (Section B.2.3) on an IA-32 Linux system. Again, individuals would need to have convenient access over a network from their own personal computers.

While working on this book, we successfully used Ski and NUE with Red Hat^® Linux 7.0 on an IBM ThinkPad^® (800 MHz Pentium III) running from a different partition than Windows 98SE. We transferred files via DOS floppy disk or with ftp in two steps via an intermediary system on a network.

Many computer science students have developed a personal interest in running Linux on their own computers. Thus the Ski simulator for the Itanium architecture can provide a no-cost way to explore most of the sample programs in this book.

B.1.3 Ski Simulator on a Linux Virtual Machine

Another feasible mode of study would involve installing Ski and NUE (Section B.2.3) on an emulated IA-32 virtual machine. Connectix^™ Corporation developed Connectix Virtual PC^™ software for recent versions of Windows, Macintosh OS, and Macintosh OS X. One of those host systems can operate multiple virtual machines for PC-DOS, versions of Windows, various Linux distributions, or other operating systems for the IA-32 architecture.

While working on this book, we successfully used Ski and NUE with Mandrake^™ Linux 7.0 running as a virtual machine on a Macintosh PowerBook^® (400 MHz G3, Mac OS 9.1) with Connectix Virtual PC 4.0, which emulates the Intel Pentium II hardware.

The virtual machine can initiate network traffic but cannot be readily accessed from the outside with telnet or ftp because it dynamically obtains a nonroutable Internet Protocol (IP) number from the Connectix software and uses nonstandard network ports remapped within the virtual machine. For this reason, it is not very feasible for multiple persons to share Ski and NUE in this mode using a virtual machine.

Network file transfer

We transferred files with ftp by establishing a connection from the emulated environments to the Macintosh OS, first enabling the ftp server provided within BetterTelnet (Section B.3.2), then specifying the actual IP number of the Macintosh itself (as reported in the TCP/IP control panel) on the Linux ftp command line, and changing the directory to "Desktop Folder". Note that this method works only when the Macintosh is connected to a LAN or ISP that provides routing services. Otherwise, Virtual PC (4.0) supports IP traffic directly between the two environments only if the computer has two physical Ethernet interfaces connected with a crossover cable.

Floppy disk transfer

We used the Virtual Disk Assistant provided with Virtual PC to make a floppy disk image file. When that file was mounted using Macintosh Disk Copy, the resulting "untitled" icon on the desktop behaved like a true floppy disk. At the same time, that file could also be mounted by Virtual PC. Mandrake Linux would immediately see it as the read-only device /mnt/floppy. We did not have to edit the default /etc/fstab file, nor was superuser privilege needed.

Only one of the two environments can have read/write access, however, and Disk Copy lacks an option to mount the floppy image read-only. On the rare occasions when we wanted to write on the image from the Linux environment, we mounted it only with Virtual PC, and Mandrake Linux made it available for read/write access. After dismounting the image through the Virtual PC lower menu bar icon, we could mount the image using Disk Copy to gain access to files in "untitled" on the Macintosh desktop.

B.1.4 Other Simulators

The Virtutech^® Simics™ product can simulate, at the instruction set level, uni- or multiprocessor Itanium configurations that are hosted on a Solaris 8, Windows 2000/NT/XP, or Linux/x86 system. Native Itanium operating systems and development software, not supplied by Virtutech, can be installed from standard CD-ROM distributions. Virtutech offers low- or no-cost academic annual licensing:

http://www.virtutech.com/