On Wed, Dec 16, 1998 at 10:09:10AM -0500, Andrew Isaacson wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 16, 1998 at 08:23:29AM -0500, Lindgren, Jon wrote:
> > Well, perhaps it's time to make the S3 and the SVGA work.  Does anyone know
> > what might be involved in this?  Does XFree86 run on other 64bit platforms,
> > or are a good deal of cleanups necessary?  I, for one, would love to use a
> > card other than the DEC chip which came with my alpha.
> 
> XFree86 runs just fine on Linux/Alpha.  Most of the drivers are
> supported.

Neither Linux/Alpha nor FreeBSD/alpha run on many of the systems that
NetBSD/alpha runs on.

In the real world, you can't just do inb()/outb() and expect to magically be
talking to the device registers, on whatever bus it's on, assuming they're
all packed the way they are on the x86... there is a similar issue with the
mmap() of the framebuffer itself.

Linux emulates the x86.  It _can_, because it doesn't run on the alphas
with complex bus architectures.  I have NFC what FreeBSD does.