From owner-freebsd-alpha Tue Apr 20 14:16:10 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from herring.nlsystems.com (nlsys.demon.co.uk [158.152.125.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B396A151BD for ; Tue, 20 Apr 1999 14:15:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dfr@nlsystems.com) Received: from localhost (dfr@localhost) by herring.nlsystems.com (8.9.3/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA96257; Tue, 20 Apr 1999 22:18:36 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from dfr@nlsystems.com) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 22:18:36 +0100 (BST) From: Doug Rabson To: Christian Weisgerber Cc: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The Ruffian again.. In-Reply-To: <7fhoj7$dto$1@mips.rhein-neckar.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On 20 Apr 1999, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > Doug Rabson wrote: > > > Getting documentation was the thing which stopped this project. It seems > > that the firmware on these board only has a partial similarity with > > AlphaBIOS (which is fairly well documented now). Stefan Esser was working > > on this. > > Okay, now that somebody else has brought it up: > > Just what needs to be done, to get FreeBSD going on a Ruffian? At what > point has progress stalled? If I wanted to work on this, where should I > jump in, whom should I talk to? > > I don't recall ever seeing anything by Stefan Esser on this. (Is that > the same Stefan Esser who owns the NCR driver?) I have a bootstrap which runs in the same way as linload.exe from the AlphaBIOS firmware. It can load kernels (only from dedicated disks, not fdisk partitioned ones) but not much else. The firmware for the Ruffian was sufficiently different from AlphaBIOS that this program did not run. It appears that even Linux needs a special version of linload.exe for this board and documentation as to what the differences are is either unavailable or under NDA. Once that bridge is crossed, code needs to be written to initialise the runtime environment for the kernel which will involve switching to some kind of OSF palcode (or something very like it). In principle this isn't too hard but its fiddly and very hard to debug. -- Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com Nonlinear Systems Ltd. Phone: +44 181 442 9037 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message