Ronald G. Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov wrote:
when you say super socket 7 chipsets -- does this include AMD? edwin
I meant "Super Socket 7 boards" in general -- ie: the Asus P5 series, Acer boards (obviously), etc... When I say "Aladdin V Chipset", I am referring
OK, this brings up an interesting issue for the OpenBIOS community. At least one Socket 7 motherboard will support either alpha or pentium in the socket. So it's the same motherboard with a different processor. All startup tasks for the motherboard are pretty much the same.
*shock* Really ? I thought Alphas only ran on their own custom buses (EV etc...)
I had an interesting set of discussions with vendors at extreme linux last week. There's a lot of interest in linuxbios -- from Alpha motherboards too (the alpha bios'es all have sucked very badly -- dec never got it right).
Hmm, fine hardware, not so good software. Seems true of a quite a few vendors these days.
As things stand openbios is too pentium-specific. So I'd like to propose an idea. so we change the layout a bit. It's still early in the game, we can do this. A possible layout: bios/arch/i386/{poweron.s,protected_mode.s,memory.s,motherboard.c,boot.c} bios/arch/alpha/{poweron.s,protected_mode.s,memory.s,motherboard.c,boot.c} bios/payload/{your c files here}
That seems quite logical.
If we do this, we're not just for pentiums any more. That would be wonderful! Any interest?
Seems quite a good idea. Finding someone with an Alpha to test things on would be a first step though I suppose. That, and finding someone who knows the Alpha architecture.
regards,