Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2000 23:52:36 +0000 (UTC) From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: AlphaXL FAQ Message-ID: <8v9p44$1r3u$1@kemoauc.mips.inka.de> References: <20001117232306.A50269@hex.ex.muffin.org> <20001117162122.A27462@dragon.nuxi.com> <20001118191758.A18652@hex.ex.muffin.org>
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Henrik Wist <wist@ex.MuFFiN.Org> wrote: > > There is a WIP in /sys/boot/arc/ to allow us to boot and run on > > AlphaBIOS. So you'd need to jump in and hack on that to finish it. > Haven't looked at it (all 3.x boxes here), but how much work do you think it > would be? Is it feasible anyway to do it in the copious spare time? It should be pointed out that this was basically a single-handed effort by Stefan Esser, who stopped working on this (probably for reasons external to the project) quite some time ago. Stefan's work served to create a bootstrap for loading a kernel under AlphaBIOS. I don't know how close he was to finishing this. A separate, and probably more difficult problem is the PALcode issue. PALcode is a kind of very low level firmware that provides abstractions for the details of various low level operations that are determined by the implementation (exact type of CPU and board) rather than the general alpha architecture. Interrupt handling, cache issues, things like that. There are different types of PALcode to support different operating systems (Unix, VMS, MS Windows NT). The SRM console for a platform contains the Unix/VMS PALcode, the ARC/ARCSBIOS/AlphaBIOS consoles the NT PALcode. BSD requires the Unix PALcode. Linux circumvented this problem by providing the MILO bootstrap which carries its own PALcode. Unfortunately, I'm told the MILO PALcode is insufficient to run BSD--apart from potential copyright issues. So, we need: - A bootloader for ARC. (Partly done.) - Unix PALcode for every type of machine to be supported. FWIW, I have a PC164UX machine (aka "Ruffian", designed by Deskstation, ARCSBIOS, no SRM) sitting here that does very little since I've become rather unhappy with Linux. I think that's the same type of machine Stefan was working on, so I guess I should check out how far he got. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the technicial issues of getting BSD to run on ARC machines are way over my head. I'm not sure how much actual work this is, but the required _expertise_ is a big obstacle. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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