DS15 (was Re: Alpha vs. FreeBSD 5.4 vs. X)

[Wilko Bulte]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 08:44:08PM +0200, Sten Spans wrote..
> On Sat, 16 Jul 2005, Wilko Bulte wrote:
> 
> >On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 01:03:24AM +0200, Sten Spans wrote..
> >>On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Richard Loken wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>>If you succeed at that you will be loved and admired by the entire Alpha
> >>>FreeBSD user community.  Honour, fame, and happiness...  what else 
> >>>matters?
> >>
> >>I would reserve that for vga on ds15-ish systems with vga connected
> >>to hose 1 instead of 0, which should cause even more interesting
> >>stuff to happen :).
> >>
> >>( Not that fbsd works on ds15 now though :)
> >
> >Not that anyone has a DS15 (that I know of ;-) to play with it.
> 
> After some digging I did it seems that the linux support was
> done by some compaq engineers a few years ago. And that even
> inside hp these boxen are quite rare. Only the bigger

I know.  I work for HP ;)

> boxen (ds25, es45) sell in measurable quantities.

ES45 is quite popular yes.

> I've looked at the *bsd alpha architecture code,
> and found these to be pretty similar and small/minimal.
> 
> The linux code is quite a bit bigger/messier, with a lot of

....

> code duplication and compaq in it's linux days added support
> for every error condition possible. This expanded the code quite
> a bit. But lifting out the main changes needed for the newer
> motherboard chipset should be doable, the main suspect seems
> to be the location of the srm bootcode, which has been changed.

Hm.

> It wont solve the more complex issues like:
> - 2-4gb+ memory support
> - vga on different hoses
> - pci bridge chip breakage
> 
> but should allow the box to be usable in serial console
> setups, which is how sensible people use them anyway :).

Exactly :)

-- 
Wilko Bulte				wilko at FreeBSD.org