From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] alpha anyone?
From: David Gordon Hogan <dhog@plan9.bell-labs.com>
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Message-Id: <20001128192607.7B7C6199EE@mail.cse.psu.edu>
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 14:25:46 -0500
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> has anyone gotten plan9 to boot on alpha?

I have!

> does anyone one the correct format for booted_dev in SRM so that it
> could be recognized by getether()?
> 
> does anyone know *what* booted_dev is responsible for?

booted_dev is set by the SRM console.  At least on my AlphaPC it is.
Alas, this was the only way I could find of getting the ethernet address
(which is required for bootp to work).  Perhaps there's some "ioctl"
for doing this "correctly", but it's not documented anywhere that I
could find.

It sounds like the SRM console on your (older) Alpha isn't doing
this.  Perhaps they only added the feature in a later version of
SRM.  You could try going to www.compaq.com and getting the
latest version of the firmware.  Or you could hard-code the ether
address as a stop-gap measure.

I'm still searching for a better solution; perhaps something will come up.