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Revision 1.17, Wed May 14 19:11:39 1997 UTC (27 years ago) by niklas
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<h2>OpenBSD/alpha</h2>

<hr>
<h3><strong>History and Status:</strong></h3>

<p>
The alpha port was derived from, and still tracks, the NetBSD/alpha port
written by Chris Demetriou <cgd@netbsd.org>.  However this tracking is jumpy
at best, don't expect the latest NetBSD changes to be in our tree at any
given time, the merges are being done when time allows.
<p>
Initially the reason for existence of this port was to provide the OpenBSD
operating system to alpha users, i.e. no special effort was put in to develop
the port in the machine dependent parts.  The main thing that got done was to
ensure that all the tools needed to build a full system was included in the
tree, as well as updated with the changes Chris distributed in a separate
alpha toolchain package.
<p>
Today a lot more developers have got themselves alpha machines and we are
seeing interest in a more active port.  This fact has so far only led to the
adaption of the if_ed ethernet driver to be usable by the
alpha port, but there is ongoing work on ISA DMA, floppy, IDE & ATAPI support.
<p>
So far <a href="http://www.appli.se/niklas/">Niklas Hallqvist</a>
<a href=mailto:niklas@openbsd.org>&lt;niklas@openbsd.org&gt;</a> has been
keeping the port alive, but with the larger developer community coming up
this will hopefully be a more distributively (and better) maintained port.
</p>

<h3><strong>Projects (in no particular order):</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>ISA DMA support (needed for floppy support among other stuff).
<li>Floppy support.
<li>IDE/ATAPI support.
<li>DDB support.
<li>ELF switchover (automatically brings us shared libraries).
</ul>

<h3><strong>Snapshots:</strong></h3>
<p>
OpenBSD/alpha has not yet seen a proper release, but Thomas Graichen
<a href=mailto:graichen@openbsd.org>&lt;graichen@openbsd.org&gt;</a>
has been creating OpenBSD/alpha snapshots from time to time. You may find them
on <a href=ftp.html>the usual OpenBSD ftp servers</a>.  Please talk to Thomas
if you are wondering over installation issues.
</p>

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