First place to start is by getting the FAQ from cage.cs.arizona.edu in
/pub/linux. That'll answer a lot of your questions...
>I'm thinking of buying an Alpha motherboard and getting a Linux
>system up on it. Has anyone tried to bootstrap an Linux/AXP system
>with no support other than an existing x86 Linux system (i.e. with
It's a lot easier when I did it--there's an Alpha/Linux distribution
put together by DEC that you can get. I think it's mentioned in
David's FAQ.
I've also put together a root/boot disk & some additional binaries for
getting started. It's basically what I used to get my system up and
working, tho some of it is broken & needs to be redone for a newer
kernel...the DEC distribution is a much better way to go.
I don't know what the DEC distribution is doing for disk labels, but
I've written a very simple disklabel program that will let you do this
from Linux. It even works now :-)
>What support from OSF/1 does Linux/AXP rely on? Compiler, libraries,
You can use stuff from OSF/1 to any degree you want, but it's not
necessary. I've put together a working gcc-2.7.0, binutils & Linux
libc. Works pretty well, tho the networking code in libc is untested
(the kernel currently doesn't support networking) and things are still
under development.
>I gather one can buy relatively cheap Alpha motherboards which can
>drop into a PC case and take normal PCI cards (the impression I
>get from reading the Alpha parts of the Linux source). Does anyone
>have experience with these sorts of boards; what works, what's
>broken, what is worth using?
I'm using a DEC Noname (AXPpci33) motherboard, which is the PCI-based
board that uses the LCA (Low Cost Alpha) chip. I haven't had any
particular problems with it at all...it supports SCSI & IDE drives
(most people are using SCSI), two serial and one parallel ports, PS/2
keyboard & mouse...there's more on it in the FAQ.
Not many drivers have been ported, so that may be a problem for a
while. All the builtin hardware on the motherboard is supported.
>Have there been any thoughts about using ELF as an executable and
>object file format, or is the OSF/1 one going to be the sole format
David Mosberger-Tang and I had decided at one point that ELF was the
way to go, but after further discussions with other folks it doesn't
seem worth the effort right now. The only real reason to go with ELF
is because the x86 port uses it (well, ECOFF does have some
disadvantages...)
But let's face it--there won't be any binaries shared between the two
platforms, so the only real advantage right now is less work in
getting a libc that works between the two platforms. The other
difficult is that there are currently no GNU tools to generate shared
libs for Alpha/ECOFF, so all the binaries built using GNU tools are
statically linked.
Bob