> I recently bought an AXPpci motherboard and just installed NetBSD/alpha
> from the most recent snapshot.

Cool!


> Some problems:
> 
> My de ethernet card doesn't work.  Is this supported in that release?

Yes, it's supported.  What kind of board do you have?  (dmesg output
would be good.  actually, make that complete dmesg output, because i'd
like to make sure that your system is actually one that's been seen
before.)


> The machine tends to get "machine check" panics quite often under
> nearly any medium to heavy use.

That's ... interesting.

Others have reported problems like that, but as i recall such problems
were all either:
	(1) remedied by firmware upgrades, or

	(2) remedied by fixes to the 'ncr' driver.


It'd be sort of interesting to see what information is printed about
the machine checks, esp. what's at the PC and RA when the machine
checks are taken.  (you can use 'list *<hex address>' in a GDB run on
the kernel (with debugging symbols, i.e. the .gdb version of the
kernel) to tell you that.)


> Is anyone working on getting the (seemingly) ISA IDE controller working
> on the alpha?  If not, I will probably work on this, hopefully cleaning
> up the crusty old wd driver in the process.

Actually, i've already done this, as has Charles (seperately).
Neither are ready for the master source tree, yet, though.


> If anyone can build a more recentl kernel which fixes the first two
> (I'm not crossing my fingers on the IDE one :) problems, please
> let me know.

Hopefully one of the people who had machine-check problems (i think
they were on the Multia/UDB systems, but those are effectively the
same as the AXPpci systems) will speak up and mention what they did to
fix them.



cgd