Re: GNU Mach on Alpha

[Andrew M. Miklic]

> Please tell us all the details you can about exactly which version of the
> CMU Alpha port code you got from where.


I _believe_ it is the old version 2.5 source (by 3.0, support seems to have
been dropped)...


> As to the oskit-mach issue, I'd say you should just stick with what you
are
> doing with gnumach as it is for now.  Since what you are putting in to
> start with is a complete Mach-native port with its own drivers, and the
> OSKit has not been ported to Alpha, then you don't really have anything to
> use the OSKit for anyway.  The oskit-branch changes include a lot of other
> random cruft removal, but that ought to merge ok with the CMU Alpha code.
> The makefiles in the oskit-branch presume you'll have oskit and have some
> x86isms in them, so you'd have to diddle with that to get it to build.  I
> will be happy to clean that stuff up myself when we merge the oskit-branch
> into the gnumach mainline, which is not too far off.


Unfortunately, the chipset and driver support is SO old that it wouldn't
even support the machine I have, so since I'd have to add device drivers
anyway, I'll probably just add support to OSKit for Alpha for select devices
that are common and generic to both x86 and alpha platforms (i.e., VGA,
PS/2, COM ports, etc.)...


> It would be a fine thing for someone to do an Alpha port of OSKit, using
> the latest *BSD and Linux code for hardware support.  If that got done,
> then we would certainly want to use the oskit libraries instead of the old
> CMU code for Alpha as much as we do for x86.  This is by far the best way
> we have of making it easy to keep up to date with new hardware support
> without having to maintain drivers ourselves.


I've got both FreeBSD and Linux installed on my machine, so I'll probably
grep from both of them...


Sincerely,
Andrew Miklic