OpenBSD/alpha

History and Status:

The alpha port was derived from the NetBSD/alpha port written by Chris Demetriou <cgd@netbsd.org>. Unfortunately we cannot track it closely anymore as some copyright issues prevent us, check our policy page for details. There have been a few efforts to keep this port modern, which also includes many userland 64 bit problems which we have tracked down and made fixes to. Many of the improvements mentioned below are not found in NetBSD, but you should do your own research to decide which those are.

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, more developers have alpha machines, and we are seeing interest in a more active port, but there still is very little active development going on. This fact has so far led to:

• A large-scale attack at fixing remaining 64-bit 'long' vs 'int' problems in the entire userland source tree. Most of these have been fixed, and new 64-bit problems are only rarely found.
• Adaptation of the if_ed ethernet driver.
• Parsing of i386 MBR & disklabels.
• DDB (kernel debugger) (disassembler, tracebacks, single stepping).
• IDE & ATAPI support.
• Easy installation via floppy.
• Fixed VGA workstation console driver. Added "stand-out" (highlight) to it too.

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)
• egcs fixes for the Ramdisk

So far Niklas Hallqvist <niklas@openbsd.org> has been trying to keep the port alive, but despite more people having alpha, the port is barely alive and not too actively maintained.

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.
• AlphaStation {200,250,255,400,500}, AXPpci,
  Multia (though many Multias have experienced infant mortality or develop problems)
  Systems 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.
    • ISA VGA 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 ethernet boards.
    • 3Com 3c503 ethernet cards.
    • 3Com 3c5xx/3c9xx ethernet cards.
    • RealTek 8129/8139 ethernet cards.
    • Lite-On PNIC (82c168, 82c169) based ethernet cards.
    • Keyboard.
    • PS/2-style mice.
    • IDE controllers (including the built-in IDE controller on some machines).
    • Intel Etherexpress Pro/100B cards.
    • Cyclades ISA multiport serial cards.
    • Adaptec 2940 based scsi boards.
  • 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.
    • The Adaptec 152* SCSI controller ISA boards.
  • Things that are *not* supported at this time:
    • 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 and ISA boards not listed above.
    • The floppy drive.
• 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

Snapshots:

OpenBSD/alpha saw its first proper release in OpenBSD 2.1 and is since then integral part of the OpenBSD releases. Between the releases also snapshots are provided from time to time.