Re: No boot on AlphaServer DS25

[Miod Vallat <miod%online.fr@localhost>]

> It's been a few years since the magic smoke came out of a chip on the 
> motherboard of my only Alpha. Recently, some fine people donated an 
> AlphaServer DS25 which will be used for bulk pkgsrc package building and 
> testing. However, it seems that while systems in the same family are 
> supported and support is implied, the system doesn't boot either netbsd-7 
> or current:

The boot fails for two reasons:
1. the NetBSD boot loader does not check that the area where it will
   load the kernel is not already claimed by the SRM. Eventually, it
   loads part of the kernel image over SRM data and/or stack, which does
   not end well.
2. the NetBSD kernel is not linked at a high enough address to work with
   that particular SRM. For some reason, Naruaki Etomi's system runs a
   particular SRM version which does not require as much memory as other
   DS25 systems. His dmesg reports
    (3248 KB reserved for PROM, 2044 MB used by NetBSD)
   but the DS25 here reserves 5304 KB for the SRM itself.