Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > OK, I am going to put in one day next week to see if I should either > - get linuxbios CURRENT back to working on ds10 > - back-port etherboot to my ANCIENT working linuxbios on ds10 > > I could use some comments from those who have tried this recently: what > exactly went wrong? Does it look huge to fix or not that big a deal? > > I have 104 of these crummy boxes so I don't mind frying 10 or so to get > this working, but I don't have a whole month to do it either. It's going > to have to converge pretty quickly since I don't want to put too much > effort into these machines -- I like 'em but compa-- er, HP doesn't -- > they killed the Alpha, after all.
With respect to killing boxes, I can provide a known good image with two copies of LinuxBIOS in it so the boxes are less likely to die. For the most part I don't think moving to a newer codebase will be all that hard, but will take several days work. Especially if you want to support etherboot this is something worth doing. The Alpha was a test to see how much we could do in the Linux kernel. The answer practically everything but it was a major maintenance problem. So (a) we need to move the palcode into LinuxBIOS. This should fix the Linux booting Linux issues. (b) Either setup the whacky virtual addressing expected by the Alpha architeture, or have a small kernel patch that can live without it. Probably the latter is easier. (c) Get a version of hardware main running on the Alpha. That is what is needed for a maintainable version. Why do you wish to port etherboot to the Alpha. I'm just trying to get a feel for what you are after. Eric
