[CLUE-Tech] Alpha bios info.

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 12-14 18:55, Dave Anselmi wrote:
> 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!!!"

I wanted to mention one thing that I saw about SRM: apparently it grabs and
keeps 2M for itself. Even with this, it's still better than AlphaBIOS. :)
And since memory prices seem to be rapidly approaching a penny per meg, I
guess that'll be two pennies to rub together, anyway...have you seen prices
on memory at places like pricewatch.com? Wow - and I thought things were
cheap last spring/summer. In any case, I've seen no mention of how much RAM
AlphaBIOS may or may not grab and keep.


> > > 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 The hardware.txt may be outdated, but it says this: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).

Did you find any good docs on SRM? I wonder if there is a way to get it to
display same info about hardware that AlphaBIOS does? Alphalinux.com still
looks to be hosed.

> 
> 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.

About the culture shock, you're not kidding. That's partly why I decided to
revert to something easy like RH - I'm still pretty new to all the *BSD
stuff, so RedHat is more stable ground.

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at attbi.com Yahoo:seanleblancathome 
ICQ:138565743 MSN:seanleblancathome AIM:sleblancathome 
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