Matthew Jacob writes:
 > >
 > >Must I do this?  The Digital Unix certified CPU's seem to cost twice as
 > >much.  The reason were going for the AlphaPC's though is that they are

Right.  Its Digital's Digital UNIX / OpenVMS copy protection fee..

It seems like the "right" thing to do might be to modify NetBSD so as
to be bootable by the linux bootloaders.  This idea has been tossed
around before.. Aside from philisophical objections, it would be a lot
of hard work. Nobody's volunteered yet.

 > >not very expensive.  With this increase in cost, it would be over our
 > >limit, and we'd be stuck with linux. :(
 > 
 > Oh, well. If that's what it costs, that's what it costs.
 > 
 > It's sacrilege for me to say so, but linux isn't all that bad,
 > although the latest linux/alpha port needs a bit of French Oak
 > aging and a bit of squinting and pinching of the nose while
 > swallowing...It's certainly better than Digital Unix, which
 > rivals Solaris for bloat- I think the image I'm happiest for
 > either Solaris or Digital Unix is: "The batter gets a really
 > good piece of the ball. Unfortunately, it always seems to
 > land 2 inches to the wrong side of the foul marker..."

Uh.. Actually I think that Digital UNIX is pretty darned nice as long
as you've got plenty of RAM to throw at it.  Somebody with a BSD
background should find it quite comfortable.  You can safely delete
most of the userland bloat.

 > In either case, if these particular boards won't run the SRM,
 > you're really ool.
 > 
 > >
 > >Also the vendor was saying that the SRM might not work with the newer
 > >lx based boards.  Any truth to this?
 > 
 > That might be the new lasered 21164 chips that have a hardwired dependency
 > (I believe) for the NT PAL code.

No.. Actually the "lx" boards have the new Pyxis (21174) core logic
chipset in them along with the normal 21164 cpus. Its basically an OEM
version of the guts of the Digital Personal Workstation series. Eg, an
AlphaPC164lx is to a DPW{433,500,600}{a,au} as an AlphaPC164 is to an
AlphaStation 500/{400,500}.  From the Digital Semiconductor docs, it
would appear that there may eventually be an SRM console for them, but
it was not orderable when I last checked.  

BTW -- The 21174 is the chipset to have if you're interested in memory
and IO bandwidth at a reasonable price.  Its head & shoulders above
the 2117{1,2}.

Speaking of 21174s, is anybody working on hardware support for the
Personal Workstation series machines?

Drew

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Gallatin				http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin
Duke University				Email:		gallatin@cs.duke.edu
Department of Computer Science		Phone:		(919) 660-6590