From owner-freebsd-alpha Fri Oct 9 03:40:47 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id DAA07141 for freebsd-alpha-outgoing; Fri, 9 Oct 1998 03:40:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from nlsystems.com (nlsys.demon.co.uk [158.152.125.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id DAA07111 for ; Fri, 9 Oct 1998 03:40:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dfr@nlsystems.com) Received: from herring.nlsystems.com (herring.nlsystems.com [10.0.0.2]) by nlsystems.com (8.9.1/8.8.5) with SMTP id LAA04558; Fri, 9 Oct 1998 11:39:37 +0100 (BST) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 11:39:37 +0100 (BST) From: Doug Rabson To: Warner Losh cc: Don , alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: interesting quote from http://cnls.lanl.gov/avalon/FAQ.html#A1 In-Reply-To: <199810080452.WAA11026@harmony.village.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wed, 7 Oct 1998, Warner Losh wrote: > In message Don writes: > : Do people actually like arc console? the srm console is so much easier to > : use and so much more console like in the first place. Does anyone really > : want to go the direction of menus and such by using a microsoft bios? > > Like/dislike has nothing to do with it. The problem is that there are > many cheaper machines that simply do not have SRM on them at all. A > prudent course would be to support both. Dec has released enough > information to write a boot loader for the ARC/Alpha console (and > microsoft just released enough information to write one for ARC/Mips, > now that it is dead). I have plenty of documentation for the thing and I believe that porting our new bootstrap to ARC would be fairly straightforward. The main sticking point is the need for OSF compatible PALcode for each supported platform. There is some code available in MILO which could be made to work (with some effort). Finding time to work on this is also a problem... -- Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com Nonlinear Systems Ltd. Phone: +44 181 951 1891 Fax: +44 181 381 1039 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message