From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sat May 30 23:03:37 1998
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To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
Subject: Re: AlphaBIOS documentation 
Cc: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 30 May 1998 09:21:08 PDT."
		<199805301621.JAA06062@antipodes.cdrom.com> 
References: <199805301621.JAA06062@antipodes.cdrom.com>  
Date: Sun, 31 May 1998 00:03:11 -0600
From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
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In message <199805301621.JAA06062@antipodes.cdrom.com> Mike Smith writes:
: I think the Linux-Mips ARC bootloader is similar.

The Linux/MIPS ARC bootloader is *NOT* similar.  It uses the ARC BIOS
routines in a way that works around many of the bugs in the ARC BIOS
implementations that are out there.  It loads the kernel using
standard ARC BIOS calls.  The only thing "interesting" that it does is
provide support for loading ELF kernels when the ARC BIOS itself only
supports COFF or ECOFF.

ARC BIOS is kinda cool.  Too bad it is buggy as heck on most
machines.  It works well enough to get NT running, and that's about it
:-(.

I don't know how different the ALPHA version of ARC is.  I have the
standard knocking around somewhere for the MIPS based version.

Warner


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