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

[Sten Spans]

On Sat, 16 Jul 2005, Bernd Walter wrote:

> 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.

Cool, please notify the list when the code goes in.


>> - 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.

This is indeed, almost impossible to integrate cleanly into
the freebsd source code. The funny thing is that the ds15
is the only box which needs these tricks, because the bigger
boxen have hose 0 and 1 active and usable. It would be
a bit silly to fuck over the source tree for hardware
which is almost unobtainable and extremely expensive (8000$).

Which is why I would applaud someone for doing it :}

>> - 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...

That is indeed the main issue, I havent really looked
if any other os-es have solved this issue.

-- 
Sten Spans

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen - Anthem