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.
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 led to:
- Adaption of the if_ed ethernet driver.
- Parsing of i386 MBR & disklabels.
- DDB (kernel debugger).
- IDE & ATAPI support.
- Easy installation via floppy.
Projects (in no particular order):
- ISA DMA (enables many common PC peripherals to be used)
- floppy support (requires ISA DMA).
- ELF object file format (gives shared libs)
So far Niklas Hallqvist <niklas@openbsd.org> 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.
Supported Hardware:
- DEC 3000/[3456789]00 series with the following peripherals:
- Supported hardware:
- Built-in serial ports.
- Built-in LANCE ethernet.
- Built-in SCSI chips (53c[f]94), though both may not work at the same time.
- Things that may work but haven't been tested:
- TurboChannel option slot LANCE (PMAD-A).
- Things are *not* supported at this time:
- Frame buffers of any type.
- Other TurboChannel option boards.
- The ISDN/Audio chip.
- Supported hardware:
- AlphaStation {200,250,255,400,500} and AXPpci systems (including the Multia) using the following peripherals:
- Supported hardware:
- NCR 53c810 SCSI (built-in or PCI board).
- Built-in ns16550 serial ports.
- DC21040-based ethernet (built-in or PCI board).
- DC21140-based PCI ethernet boards.
- DC21050-based PCI-PCI bridges (though other types of PCI-PCI bridges should work).
- PCI VGA video boards.
- DEC ZLXp-E1 (DC21030-based, "TGA") video boards.
- PCI and ISA NE2000-compatible ethernet cards.
- SMC/WD 8003, 8013, and the SMC "Elite16" ISA boards.
- Keyboard.
- PS/2-style mice.
- Things that may work but haven't been tested:
- Built-in parallel ports.
- ISA ns16x50-family serial port boards.
- ISA ns16x50 multi-port serial boards.
- Other NCR 53c8xx SCSI boards.
- Things that are *not* supported at this time:
- ISA VGA boards.
- Sound hardware (including Windows Sound System built-in on some machines).
- DEC ZLXp-E2 and ZLXp-E3 PCI video boards.
- The built-in scsi controller on the AlphaStation 600.
- PCI boards not listed above.
- The floppy drive.
- IDE controllers (including the built-in IDE controller on some machines).
- Supported hardware:
- At this time none of the following systems are supported:
- DECpc AXP 150 systems (EISA-bus PC-like systems)
- Alpha "server" systems (other than perhaps the AlphaServer 400, which might be an AlphaStation 400 in disguise).
- Multiprocessor Alpha systems
Projects (in no particular order):
- ISA DMA support (needed for floppy support among other stuff).
- Floppy support.
- IDE/ATAPI support.
- DDB support.
- ELF switchover (automatically brings us shared libraries).
Snapshots:
OpenBSD/alpha saw its first proper release in OpenBSD 2.1. Thomas Graichen <graichen@openbsd.org> has been creating OpenBSD/alpha snapshots from time to time. You may find them on the usual OpenBSD ftp servers. Please talk to Thomas if you are wondering over installation issues.
www@openbsd.org
$OpenBSD: alpha.html,v 1.23 1997/07/08 14:03:37 niklas Exp $