( was:  Re: NetBSD/alpha on AlphaPC 164LX? )

Re: SRM on the 164lx board, there are vendors selling Digital Unix
on the 164lx board.

I'm looking at buying Microway's version of this board
which has 6 PCI slots (instead of 4) and 8 MB of cache
(instead of 2 or 4).  Is anyone running NetBSD on this?
(Or is there any reason NetBSD would not run on this machine?)

Has anyone looked into how much difference the cache size makes
for general Unix work?  Microway has a benchmark graph for a
cache-and-memory-friendly floating point number crunching app, but
I'm more interesting in workloads involving running a variety of
processes in a cache unfriendly manner.  (Shell scripts, multi user,
compiling, emacs (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping :-)  ),
web browsing, the usual Unix stuff.)  After poking around with
ps/vmstat/iostat/etc. I've finally decided that the uneven performance
of my current machine (Multia/UDB) is mostly due the the small
non-upgradable 256k cache and wish to avoid this with the next machine.
Given the cost of cache memory, it isn't clear to me whether going to
8MB is worthwhile or not.

Has anyone tried the 164lx SRM on the 164ux board?

Poking around, it appears that the Multia/UDB is the only system with the
Fail Safe Loader?  How does one upgrade the firmware on other Alpha
systems?  Do they have a way to recover from corrupted firmware?
E.g. is it safe to buy a lx board with ARC/AlphaBIOS?