FYI, no-go with booting FreeBSD-5.3 on AlphaServer ES40

[Wilko Bulte]

On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 08:21:35PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote..
> I was just trying to take a chance on testing the bge(4) driver from
> FreeBSD and so tried booting the latest release on my client's ES40.
> 
> Unfortunately even if it had not panic'ed I wouldn't have got the root
> filesystem mounted as the bge(4) driver doesn't even seem to be a
> default in the GENERIC kernel, which is pretty silly given that it the
> driver for one of the more common GigE cards supplied by DEC/Compaq/HP,
> e.g. the DEGXA-TX.....  Looks like there are some problems with other
> drivers too, but of course I don't know how serious they are.
> 
> Maybe this "boot -v" output will help someone get it further along.
> 
> Note that NetBSD does boot and run quite well on the system so long as
> the ohci driver is omitted from the kernel and so long as none of the
> IDE devices are accessed (or their driver is also omitted).  The only
> only problem is that both NetBSD's bge(4) and wm(4) drivers have rather
> poor GigE performance on this system (once their minor bugs are fixed),
> apparently because we have too much memory installed in it (and it's
> only at half capacity!).  What good is an alpha if you can't put more
> than 4GB in it!  ;-)

FreeBSD does not even support 4GB so don't moan... :-P

> Perhaps omitting ochi and atapci et al would help FreeBSD boot on the
> ES40 as well?  For the very near term I can try netbooting other kernels

That is not the reason.

> for testing.  Note I'm not subscribed to the list though.

I tested FreeBSD on ES40 some releases back and it worked OK.

> real memory  = 17172619264 (16377 MB)

But surely not on 16G RAM.

-- 
Wilko Bulte				wilko at FreeBSD.org