Re: Everyone's SRM woes

[alvin <alvin iplink net>]

Alan Young wrote:
> 
> Peter Petrakis wrote:
> >
> > Alan Young wrote:
> >
> > Agreed. Though like you said, these machines run UNIX not windows.
> 
> Well, my machines up til last year or so ran NT fairly regularly.
> (I've kicked my Lightwave habit for the moment...)
> The LX164 and PC64 and other machines were sold as "dual booters".
> You could run NT, Tru64 and even OpenVMS on a bunch of them.
> 
> > It's not an excuse to cop out of having a nice BIOS setup your hardware
> > and bootstrap your box.
> 
> Agreed.  I think this is why AlphaBIOS came into being.
> It was step in the right direction.
> 
> > I don't fully understand why milo was needed to begin with.
> > If it was all just to switch palcode and mess with some registers then
> > why couldnt ARC/AB be extend to use that PAL and do the setup required and your
> > off. The only thing you would care about is passing cli arguments and you
> > already could do that with ARC/AB.
> 
> Good Question.  I've never dug into that one.
> One would guess that Linus' and/or DEC's original port may have attempted
> to use the PALcode in the ARC firmware.  I've been trying to recall if
> BLADE was developed on a SRM box or not.... Since SRM was being sold
> seperately back then, MILO may have been a stopgap measure so people
> did not have to pay extra to run a (semi-)free OS.  They may have had
> ARC issues so something more SRM-like was substituted???
> Could also be ARC was centered around a certain 32-bit OS and did
> not "fully" support 64-bitness?

ARC like SRM only works to the extent that that they support the OS and
disk formats they were designed for. SRM uses OSF disklabels and
partitions. ARC uses DOS/Win formats. Milo was a way to get from the
linload.exe and DOS/Win format executable to the point where a elf or
a.out could be booted off an ext2 format partition.

The folks at Dec/Compaq have gone from SRM to ARC to AlphaBios and now
sort of back to SRM. The API people are now shipping SRM but it looks
like they are working on a propritary new boot method.

I have 10 year old PC's that boot the same way that the one I bought
last week boots. I have 4 generations of Alphas using 5 different boot
methods. This makes me crazy. I spend far too much time screwing around
with the boot loaders on various machines than I should have to. 

Since there is not enough alpha hardware being sold to force convergence
to a single boot method I would like to see somthing that is community
supported.
Compaq and API have there own reasons to support and drop support on
vairous technologies the linux community shold not be limited by these 2
companies.

To some extent who cares what Compaq and API do. The people running
linux on alpha the ability to have a reliable and supported boot loader.
If Compaq and API require magical boot loaders for there OS's then so be
it.

[snip]


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Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (416)585-9971
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