Subject: Re: New to Alpha & NetBSD, any pointers?
To: None <howardl@abs.net, port-alpha@netbsd.org>
From: Ross Harvey <ross@teraflop.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 08/31/1999 10:29:14
> From: Howard Leadmon <howardl@abs.net>
>
>    Hello All,
>
>  Just joined this list a couple hours ago, so sorry if I ask anything
> that was recently discussed here..
>
>  I managed to get my hands on a few 164SX/533 boards, and wanted to 
> get a decent UNIX on it instead of NT.  So if I went looking, and got
> the SRM console loaded, and even made the install disks for NetBSD, and
> loaded the base OS on the 3GB EIDE drive I had sitting here.  So as of
> now I have a basic Alpha/NetBSD 1.4.1 kernel up and running.  Here are 
> the few issues I have run into..
>
> First, when I boot from SRM to the hard-drive, everything seems like it's 
> going great.  I see the primary loader run, then the secondary, and it
> initializes all the devices.  Finally it goes to mount the root filesystem
> and I get a message like telling me it can't. here is the msg from the 
> logs:
>
> WARNING: can't figure what device matches "IDE 0 108 0 0 0 0 0"

Sigh, SRM has gone back and forth on how it identifies IDE boot devices
for that board. Some SRM versions call them SCSI, some IDE, and now it
looks like sometimes the device is in the 100s digit and sometimes in the
1000s digit. Maybe the SCSI-happy SRM uses the 4-digit and the IDE-
happy SRM uses the 3? Or maybe my quick guess is just wrong...

Either way, this is an easy kernel fix, except that it looks like the
obvious fix will break platforms it presently works fine on. So, either
say "root on wd0" in your kernel config, or hack (if the board is system
type 26, "eb164", I'm not sure) dec_eb164_device_register() in
/sys/arch/alpha/alpha/dec_eb164.c to recognize the `108' properly.

Actually, one of us (Veego?!) can do that for you, if you will send me or
post your dmesg. And it would be really cool if you could s/#if 0/#if 1/
around the printf's in that above module first, and then use _that_ kernel
for the dmesg you send us.

	ross.harvey@computer.org