DS15 (was Re: Alpha vs. FreeBSD 5.4 vs. X)

[Bernd Walter]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 08:44:08PM +0200, Sten Spans wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Jul 2005, Wilko Bulte wrote:
> 
> >On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 01:03:24AM +0200, Sten Spans wrote..
> >>On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Richard Loken wrote:
> It wont solve the more complex issues like:
> - 2-4gb+ memory support

In progress - ENOTIME catched me a few times.
An AS4100 with 5.5G memory reminds me everyday about this.
I'm currently about to prepare first commits to get infrastructure in.
That is having all machine types tell about their direct map size and
pointers to architecuture dependend map functions.

> - vga on different hoses

There are very special things going on.
Even on i386 there are many troubles if a card wasn't intilized with
VGA emulation.

> - pci bridge chip breakage

Generally speaking PCI bridge support is MI and works fine on all
supported alpha machines.
There are a few machine types that still have wrong interrupt routing,
but that's a matter of testing and not implementation - this should
apply only to a few very old machine types.
However there is a lot of driver breakage in respect of memory mode
access and since SRM configures no IO space behind PCI bridges it's
a real problem.
We may need to have code for doing resource allocation ourself, so that
we get IO space behind bridges or fix all drivers.
Fixing drivers would be an endless story IMHO...

> but should allow the box to be usable in serial console
> setups, which is how sensible people use them anyway :).

:)

-- 
B.Walter                   BWCT                http://www.bwct.de
bernd at bwct.de                                  info at bwct.de