Jeff Roberson writes:
 > I booted a freebsd, and a linux kernel on the machine last night.  Both,
 > to my surprise, worked.  Although freebsd doesn't support ide on the

FreeBSD 4.0-current supports IDE on alphas.  Make sure you have the
ata device in your kernel config file:

controller      ata0
device          atadisk0        # ATA disk drives
device          atapicd0        # ATAPI CDROM drives
device          atapifd0        # ATAPI floppy drives
device          atapist0        # ATAPI tape drives

As to why FreeBSD works and NetBSD doesn't, I'm not sure.  I used to
have some machines with buggy pyxis revs, and I remember that bursty
writes to dense space pci memory may also trigger a lockup.  I don't
think there is anything inherently broken in NetBSD, it may just be
that FreeBSD & linux draw the screen differently & don't trigger the
hardware bug.

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