Stefan Reinauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > * Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [020715 06:47]: > > > > 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'd definitely prefer the first one. How universal is the code that > was written back then btw?
There was a fair bit that was Tsunami specific. But it was written to be as well factored, and general as possible. That just isn't very possible on the alpha. > I saw a lot of stuff is hard coded for > the DS10/Tsunami stuff but it looks like with only a little bit more > effort we could get this working on more Alphas (especially the older > machines that _have_ to use milo now come to my mind. A boot solution > including LinuxBIOS looks a lot more sane to me than forward porting > milo to every little Kernel change. > There's no market potential in this, but at least keeping those machines > that are already out there in a sane state would be very nice and milo > is anything but sane. I won't get in the way. This does assume people have time to do the work, and no market potential makes those people harder to find. > > 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 sent a patch to this list some time ago that made the stuff compile > again at least. One of the things to do is to move the LinuxBIOS table > stuff out of the i386 dependant code so it fits nicer into the scheme > when using it on other architectures. > The rest is more like glueing things together in the right order again > and getting rid of the Universal Boot(?) stuff Right. The first draft of my stuff. The big problem was that I was passing information instead of leaving it in a semi-standard location where it could be scanned for. > > 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 > > Are all machines capable of switching between 2 firmware images in rom? >From what I heard most are. And for those that aren't a little care will allow us to implement it totally in software. The SROM implements the failover, the existing failover. > how can I determine is this is possible on a certain box? Is the second > image visible when booting the first one? Yes. > I.e. do I have to flash the > LinuxBIOS image to a certain position and take care not to overwrite > other areas in flash? Basically the SROM scans for either the first or the second valid boot header. This is actually one of the slower parts of the boot. > I have 2 machines left, one of them has a flakey > motherboard or power supply, but i think it is good enough for > kill^H^H^H^Htesting linuxbios on it. Though i want to keep risk as low > as possible after I killed one machine a while ago but flashing the > kernel image with a position offset of 512bytes from what LinuxBIOS > expected (stupid me) Ron or I should be able to give you a working image to start with. > > effort into these machines -- I like 'em but compa-- er, HP doesn't -- > > they killed the Alpha, after all. > > Unlike a lot of modern CPUs Alphas are said to be designed without > heavy use of autorouting stuff, so it is rather expensive for them > to move to smaller production methods. This might be one of the reasons > why the Alpha does not really seem to be a loved child since a very long > time. It helps nothing though. The architecture is nice and keeping it > alive a bit longer is probably worth some effort. From what I heard > Alpha is going to be developed until somewhen after 2010, whereas ia32 > is said to be dead in 2006 - not really a dead arch if you look at both > players. The alpha development is dead or winding down (no new alpha projects). x86 will probably be alive forever in embedded products. And new development is happening right now. 2006 is I suspect is when intel hopes it can kill x86 but that sounds rather optimistic, and reminds me of the pentium pro. If the Hammer takes off x86 could have another twenty years of life, even on the desktop. Eric
