From owner-freebsd-alpha Thu May 15 15:32:24 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id PAA21280 for alpha-outgoing; Thu, 15 May 1997 15:32:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from duke.cs.duke.edu (duke.cs.duke.edu [152.3.140.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA21275 for ; Thu, 15 May 1997 15:32:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from hurricane.cs.duke.edu (hurricane.cs.duke.edu [152.3.145.1]) by duke.cs.duke.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA09021; Thu, 15 May 1997 18:32:20 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from gallatin@localhost) by hurricane.cs.duke.edu (8.8.4/8.7.3) id SAA28646; Thu, 15 May 1997 18:32:19 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 18:32:19 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199705152232.SAA28646@hurricane.cs.duke.edu> From: Andrew Gallatin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Warner Losh Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Alpha questions.. In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 6.22 under 19.15 XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Warner Losh writes: > In message Curt Sampson writes: > : I'm not entirely up on the services the various flavours of PALcode > : provide, but I'm extremely dubious that it would be easy, or even > : possible, to have a single kernel work with more than one flavour > : of PALcode. Looking at the instruction sets they provide it's > : obvious that they are very different. > > The key here is that we can generally load in our own PALs (ala milo) > and then it won't be an issue. > > : Also, I understand that the PALcode in MILO is not idential to the > : PALcode in the SRM console firmware. Download milo & have a look. The palcode claims to be the OSF PAL code. Also, since Linux can boot from either SRM or Milo, it would seem that the OSF PAL code in Milo & in the SRM console are "close enough." > So long as the few PALs that are called are functionally the same, it > shouldn't be an issue.... > > Now trying to get this to work with both NT's PAL set and SRM's PAL > set w/o loading our own might be very interesting indeed. And might > be hard like you describe since we'd need a HAL-like layer over the > PALs. Seems easiest to just use the same OSF PALcode that Linux is using. Since DEC is paying people to support Linux, one would hope that it would always be freely available. Drew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew Gallatin http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590