[CLUE-Tech] Alpha bios info.

[Dave Anselmi]

Sean LeBlanc wrote:

> Well, it was the floppy cable - it was pretty much dangling about a hair
> above the motherboard. Thanks for the tip. I now have SRM on the box.

That's great, glad it worked.
<snip>

> Did you say you got a blue screen at one point? I think the FreeBSD
> hardware.txt mentioned that in some instances, a Ctrl-Alt-Del is needed to
> get the "attention" of SRM in cases like this.

The blue screen I meant was the one put up by the fwupdate program.  3 menu options but
the keyboard didn't seem to work.  I tried everything, and finally got an adapter for
an old AT keyboard I have (my only spare).  That fixed it and I now have SRM too.  To
echo a phrase I learned here, "Woohoo!!!"

> > Since you can boot linux with Milo from both SRM and Alphabios, you might be
> > able to hack together something with it that boots FreeBSD.
>
> I'm not so sure. The hardware.txt may be outdated, but it says this:
>
>         As part of the SRM you will get the so called OSF/1 PAL code (OSF/1 being
>         the initial name of Digital's UNIX offering on Alpha). The PAL code can be
>         thought of as a software abstraction layer between the hardware and the
>         operating system. It uses normal CPU instruction plus a handful of
>         privileged instructions specific for PAL use. PAL is not microcode. The ARC
>         console firmware contains a different PAL code, geared towards WinNT and in
>         no way suitable for use by FreeBSD (or more generic: Unix or OpenVMS).
>         Before someone asks: Linux/alpha brings its own PAL code, allowing it to
>         boot on ARC and AlphaBIOS. There are various reasons why this is not a very
>         good idea in the eyes of the *BSD folks. I don't want to go into details
>         here. If you are interested in the gory details search the FreeBSD and
>         NetBSD web sites.
>
> Maybe Milo is what provides this PAL code, though, so maybe the above is a
> moot point?

Yes, the milo howto explains all the pieces it contains, and PAL code is one of them.
The milo source contained a free version of the PAL, separate from the 'official'
version from DEC (though you could build with either if you had it).  It seemed that
milo does several things the kernel does, like setting up protected mode.  So I can
understand the BSD folks not trusting it.  SRM is a better console in any case (more
features, just not friendly to winders users).

But if you've got SRM, should be moot.

You might try checking support for scsi cdroms in FreeBSD.  I don't know how standard
that is (using an alpha is bad enough culture shock, without trying to do BSD too).
For the network, check that it's enabled and so on.  I noticed under the Alphabios,
mine was disabled originally.  But the bios sets it up using dhcp just fine once it's
enabled.

Dave