OpenBSD/alpha

History and Status:

The alpha port was derived from, and still tracks, the NetBSD/alpha port written by Chris Demetriou . 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.

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 make the port self-hosting, i.e. ensuring 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 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.

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.

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 has not yet seen a proper release, but 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.