Instead of modifying netbsd, why not make milo a really useful tool
so that it can be used to boot ANYTHING, add cpio, rawrite and stuff
like that.  Make it work from both SRM and ARC.  Of course, if Digital
plays games with their cpu's, your stuck.


On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Andrew Gallatin wrote:

> 
> 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
>