From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <5bb09b1aba0c3cd4348972f59e4a6a08@collyer.net> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] bootalphapc From: Geoff Collyer Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2004 21:29:04 -0700 In-Reply-To: <20040701T211505Z_FFB700000000@mail2.cu-portland.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: b31f8360-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 The Plan 9 port for the AlphaPC is only guaranteed to work on AlphaPC 164s. I have a 164LX and Plan 9 worked on that until some months ago, when interrupts from the PCI bus stopped working. DEC continued its trajectory from the PDP-11 through the VAX to the Alpha of excluding more and more of the sorts of things you'd need to get a machine booted from what it considers to be Architecture and calls them Implementation-specific. Having granted themselves licence, they then went hog-wild and build lots of systems with wildly varying Implementation bits. Andrey made a quick attempt at getting the AlphaPC port to run on an Alphaserver. It didn't work, didn't look easy to make work, and he couldn't devote much time to it. The Plan 9 alphapc boot code uses the SRM firmware for the actual I/O, which may be why it's so slow. If you're willing to write the code, it ought to be possible to boot from other devices. Getting documentation on the firmware is likely to be the tricky part.