Re: [9fans] Installing Plan9 on a DEC Alpha Workstation

["Paweł Lasek" <pawel.lasek@gmail.com>]

On Feb 13, 2008 6:22 PM, devrin talen <jackfrost13@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm new to plan 9 but am interested in getting it running on an Alpha
> 600a workstation that currently runs Redhat 6. I was wondering where I
> should look to get started, and if this will be feasible. I've checked
> out the website and docs but still have a few questions:
>
> * It seems that the live cd has only x86 binaries. Is there a version
> for the Alpha architecture?
> * Are there any known hardware issues with the Alpha port?
>
> Thanks!
>

AS600 has an EV5 cpu, not an EV56, so IIRC you might have to clean up
some assembler code and add some assembler for drivers to work
properly without BWX instructions (This is also a problem for my
AS255). Plan9 supported Alpha only by netbooting and only as CPU
server, at least this is what I heard (full transcript could be found
in archives). In order to get alpha binaries you will have to
recompile the system on a machine with working Plan9 installation (VM
is fine too) and for starters you will probably need one configured to
work as fileserver with alpha binaries.

You can find most of required CPU docs on the net, also *BSD might be
a good place to look for details about hardware and SRM. If you are
lucky enough, you might find somewhere the developer kits for Alpha
hardware manufacturers, which contained PALcode and SRM sources (If
you find, share them - I doubt there would be copyright problems,
given how much time passed since Compaq killed Alpha for Itanic)

Unfortunately my time for working on Alpha port is really limited and
my AS is in need of parts (It's really hard to get parity FP simms
these day, at least here, and 48 MB is not enough). And also my main
priority is to get a newer VMS installed on it, so Plan9 will need to
wait even more.

An interesting thing to try for porting might be DS10, for which
someone has been writing an emulator - It would be nice to show a
working Plan9 network composed of only Alphas one day :-)
--
Paul Lasek