Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 18:19:31 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: dfr@nlsystems.com (Doug Rabson) Cc: cjs@portal.ca, mike@smith.net.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: AlphaBIOS documentation Message-ID: <199806011819.LAA02732@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.980601094950.330P-100000@herring.nlsystems.com> from "Doug Rabson" at Jun 1, 98 09:56:03 am
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> Falling back to SRM really sucks in most cases. For some motherboards you > can't have both SRM and AlphaBIOS loaded at the same time so switching > between NT and BSD would not be a good end user experience. Switching from FreeBSD to NT is *never* a good end user experience. 8-) 8-). > Linux palcode is the same in most important places. It uses the same > conventions for PTEs, PCBs, interrupts etc. The major difference is the enforcement of the amount of RAM. Really. > > > Ideally, DEC would put OSF palcode into AlphaBIOS and make it > > > possible to switch to it using 'call_pal swppal'. > > > > Seems unlikely to me. The whole point of not having SRM console > > available is that you can't run DU, and are thus forced to by a > > more expensive machine (though with virtually identical hardware) > > to run it. > > I don't want SRM and I don't want to run DU. I just want the palcode. > Palcode != SRM. The product manager insists on charging for the OSF PALcode. Perhaps he is a mole for Microsoft. One thing to consider is that some Alpha processors are now physically incapable of having the OSF PALcode loaded on them. One very bad aspect of the NT PALcode is that NT has different needs than UNIX for VM, etc.. One place you might look is the "DEC C for OpenVMS Alpha systems" documentation. The compiler has inline instructions to allow you to make PAL calls (implying that the available calls would be documented as to purpose and effect); this is from the most recent FYI on "DEC C". 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-hackers" in the body of the message
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