> Is there any migration path to Alpha/PCI machines not involving buying
> other Alpha hardware first? I.e.: will I be (at some time in the future)
> be able to just crosscompile from my NetBSD/i386 machine and get a 
> bootable Alphastation? I sure would be willing to contribute, but don't
> have any room for yet another machine...

one would think that this would be possible.  I've not really tried
it.  My development path basically went:

	build kernel on OSF/1, put kernel on remote disk, boot
	my kernel from remote disk, have it mount binaries from NFS,
	use OSF/1 /sbin, etc. to see if things were working.
		(note that there was hair involved here; there
		are bugs in the OSF/1 mountd and some hair in the
		way the convert device nodes; i was glad to arrive
		here at CMU, because we've got an OSF/1 source license
		and i could hack the bits i needed to fix.  8-)

	build gnu build tools, as statically linked OSF/1 binaries,
	with the OSF/1 toolchain, and a couple of important, minimal,
	NetBSD binaries,  use them to boot and compile the rest of the
	world.  (still with NFS root/usr.)

	convince the kernel to talk to the local disk (Keith Bostic
	did most of this work, i debugged some of it; still am 8-),
	make local file systems, use it.  Get GNU tools happy.

Note that getting the GNU tools happy was non-trivial, because of
problems, mostly with gld.  in the sources that i'm shipping, i'm
including a _complete_ toolchain, that should be able to compile
itself into a cross-compiler -- but i dunno how well cross-development
things work going from 32 -> 64 bit platforms.  (theoretically they
should work fine, but the Alpha support in the GNU toolchain
appears... sketchy.)

> A PCI SCSI and an ethernet driver would be sufficiant for bootstrap, I guess?

yeah.  Ethernet is really the most important, at least in my mind.
Note also that NetBSD makes a good server from which to boot a
NFS-root-mounting Alpha.  (i dunno about completely diskless, as i've
never tried getting the console bootp to work...)



later,

chris