Subject: What i'm doing with NetBSD/Alpha...
To: None <port-alpha@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Chris G Demetriou <Chris_G_Demetriou@lagavulin.pdl.cs.cmu.edu>
List: port-alpha
Date: 07/02/1995 11:06:07
In case any of you were wondering what i've been up to with
NetBSD/Alpha:

I'm in the process of making consoles work.  It'd be more than a
little bit easier, if there weren't N possible console types to deal
with, but "whatever."

Right now, i've got a raster console driver (from the sparc rcons
code), sitting behind a hardware-independent terminal emulator (that i
wrote from scratch one day last week; mostly emulates a 'sun'
console), writing to my mmap'd DEC T8-02 TGA frame buffer from a
user-land process.  That all works nicely.

I've also cobbled together a PC console driver using the hardware-
independent emulator, for use with a VGA console on the i386; that'll
be useful when i try to support the VGA-ish PCI frame buffers on the
Alpha.


The next couple of few that i'm going to do are (in approximate
order):

	(1) clean up the TGA configuration support some more,

	(2) figure out how the various RAMDACs work, and try to do
		something useful with them,

	(3) add a 'workstation console' driver, and glue the
		terminal emulation code, frame buffer code, and
		keyboard-handling code on to that,

	(4) whack on things until i can log in using the monitor and
		keyboard,

	(5) beat the 'early' console configuration code over the head,
		until it actually configures the console (rather than
		putting it off until the console is probed, as is
		done now), and

	(6) fix boot device configuration, in about fifteen different
		ways.


I'm going to try to make DEC 3000 frame buffers work, but it's unclear
if i'll have the time or hardware to do so.  Apparently, i'm going to
be losing my 3000/400 soon, and it's going to be replaced by a
3000/300LX...

Once i get all of the above done, well, then it's time to try and get
a stupid Xserver running, unless someone beats me to it.  8-)  I'll
try and export snapshots of my kernel tree upon request, or after the
even-numbered steps mentioned above.



chris