From owner-freebsd-alpha Wed Oct 11 18:44:32 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from smtp05.primenet.com (smtp05.primenet.com [206.165.6.135]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DBB9537B502 for ; Wed, 11 Oct 2000 18:44:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp05.primenet.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id SAA17081; Wed, 11 Oct 2000 18:44:53 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr09.primenet.com(206.165.6.209) via SMTP by smtp05.primenet.com, id smtpdAAAaPaGjH; Wed Oct 11 18:44:39 2000 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr09.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA12166; Wed, 11 Oct 2000 18:44:11 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <200010120144.SAA12166@usr09.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Problem with FreeBSD on AlphaStation 255/233 To: mjacob@feral.com Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 01:44:11 +0000 (GMT) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), gallatin@cs.duke.edu (Andrew Gallatin), pnogas@amu.edu.pl (Pawel Nogas), freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Matthew Jacob" at Oct 11, 2000 05:52:02 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > > - You installed on a disk with an fdisk table (eg root is > > > da0s1a and not da0a) -- You cannot use fdisk slices on > > > alpha boot disks. > > > > How is this possible, using the system tools, if Alpha cannot boot > > from it? Are they broken? > > SRM doesn't grok MSDOS partitions, and SRM is the only supported boot montor. So doing closure on this: IF the Alpha distribution can create something that can't be booted by the only supported boot monitor THEN yes, the tools are broken. > > > - You accidentally managed to install with i386 and not alpha > > > distribution sets --- there are separate CDs for x86 and alpha > > > > How is this possible? Same question: is the install process broken, > > in that it actually permits this to happen, ever? > > You're talking to the wrong folks on this one. Take it up with JKH && Mike > Smith.... Identifying what needs to be done is half the battle. I have an old, slow Alpha box off of OnSale, which I may be willing to get a new scratch disk for, to work on the problem, if the soloution is known, just not yet implemented. I'm burning my think-cycles on other stuff right now, but this seems to be reducible to a "strong back, weak mind" coding problem, where the fixer won't really have to think to much about the fix, if it's know why this is possible. Worst case, we poop a file named "arch-ok" into all the tarballs, and put in the architectures it can be used on, one per line. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message