Re: disparities in hardware?

[Michal Jaegermann <michal ellpspace math ualberta ca>]

Ari Jort wrote:
> 
> Why do there seem to be such great disparities 
> in software support among the various alpha platforms?

There are no real, small or great, "disparities in software support
among the various alpha platforms". (This is not entirely true,
as something compiled to take advantage of instructions which showed
up only on newer chips, without some alternate code in case these
instructions are absent, will not run on something from an old generation
- but this is exactly the same as with any other processor family).

There are differences how different Alpha boards have to be initialized
and this creates a need for different, board specific, kernels which
differ by this small amount of code.  Actually Richard Henderson and
Jay Estabrook took a stab into a "generic" Alpha kernel which would
start on anything.  They had some degree of success in this but
I guess that there are more pressing things to do now and this
was put on a back burner.

As you can notice all Alpha Linux distributions, beyond model specific
loader and kernels, consists of software for a "generic" Alpha.

  Michal