To the OP - there were some discussions in this list about these issues,
I'm surprised you didn't look in the archive.

I have an 21164SX from Microway myself - indeed it came with ncr and
AlphaBIOS (Compaq hasn't issued SRM for the SX at that time though).
Now SRM is available for almost all Alphas, except probably RX and UX.
AlphaBIOS/SRM choice isn't easy one because there are SCSI adapters
and videocards which are supported by AlphaBIOS but not by SRM.
There is an issue of the PALcode involved too (the one from SRM is better).
However, the fact is that AlphaBIOS is EOLed, so it is not likely
that *BSD will ever boot from them.

And not for everyone to boot from AlphaBIOS is more difficult then
to boot from SRM - look in debian-alpha archives from around 96-97
and see how long it took them to get it running ;-)

Andrei


> Linux on Alpha has two and a bit ways to boot:
>
> * arc firmware + milo loader (how I did it)
> * srm + aboot loader
> * floppy booting, which is effectively DOS format loading of a kernel image
> through either SRM or arc firmware booting milo.
>
> AlphaBIOS machines are much harder to boot with. I don't know of any
> Unix-like OS (tru64 or otherwise) that uses AlphaBIOS to boot. AlphaBIOS
> only inflicts more recent Digital hardware, and generally you can make SRM
> run on them (depends on the model). AlphaBIOS and ARC firmware can both boot
> NT.
>
> Andrew
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: port-alpha-owner@netbsd.org [mailto:port-alpha-owner@netbsd.org]On
> Behalf Of Ross Harvey
> Sent: Wednesday, 30 August 2000 10:22
> To: bolo@cs.wisc.edu; port-alpha@netbsd.org
> Subject: Re: NetBSD on newer Alpha boxes?
>
> [snip]
>
> I do believe that the intraserver 3140 is based on the "ncr" 53c875 scsi
> chip, which is actually sort of our "standard" host adapter.
>
> It's true that PeeCee hardware changes very rapidly; fortunately, the
> *other* alpha os kernels don't, so as a general rule netbsd alpha supports
> the currently popular-on-alpha pci cards and such.
>
> Actually, the central question you really need to ask is: does it come with
> srm or can you get it?   If the hw supports tru64, then it does have srm.
> if it supports linux, then it probably has srm. NT uses a different console
> that, in general, none of the unix kernels run on.
>
>         Ross