Subject: Re: Are PC164 based alphas supported?
To: None <gallatin@CS.Duke.EDU>
From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 08/06/1997 14:22:28
>Matthew Jacob writes:
> > >
> > >Must I do this?  The Digital Unix certified CPU's seem to cost twice as
> > >much.  The reason were going for the AlphaPC's though is that they are
>
>Right.  Its Digital's Digital UNIX / OpenVMS copy protection fee..
>
>It seems like the "right" thing to do might be to modify NetBSD so as
>to be bootable by the linux bootloaders.  This idea has been tossed
>around before.. Aside from philisophical objections, it would be a lot
>of hard work. Nobody's volunteered yet.

Umm. You mean *like* milo? Yeah, I might go for that if we could fix milo to
allow it to reenter the prom.

>.. 
>
>Uh.. Actually I think that Digital UNIX is pretty darned nice as long
>as you've got plenty of RAM to throw at it.  Somebody with a BSD
>background should find it quite comfortable.  You can safely delete
>most of the userland bloat.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion....I've worked with OSF/1 since
before silver master (on seed Flamingo units), and it hasn't gotten
substantially better in that period of time (that's gotta be about 6
years now...). It's bloated in the kernel, and slow, and buggy. They
try, but they don't succeed, thus violating Yoda's rule #1. I'd cut
them some slack, but in my opinion DEC will die if they continue
the premise of supporting the OSF/1 product by making people pay for
it who don't want it.

>...
>Speaking of 21174s, is anybody working on hardware support for the
>Personal Workstation series machines?
>

Not that I know of. I have the AlphaService 4X00 on my plate to do over
the next couple of months (yet another bus interconnect...)