need some advice on some VAX boards ...

From: Carlini, Antonio <Antonio.Carlini_at_riverstonenet.com>
Date: Thu Oct 4 13:27:50 2001

> Eric Dittman wrote:
>
>I suppose you *COULD* write a driver that lets you use the board
>for non-booting devices if you had enough information available.

        That depends on exactly why the firmware
        will not play with VAX. My *guess* (based
        on exactly no information ...) is that it has
        intimate knowledge of some internal
        OpenVMS Alpha data structure (page
        tables or such like).

        For example,
        the DMB32 did exactly this - it could run
        in at least 4 different modes: given physical
        address (PA), given PA of a VAX page table,
        given SVA of buffer and given SVA of
        process page table. I assume the firmware
        engineers had time to kill :-)

        So it is quite possible that you would need
        to re-write the firmware to be able to do
        *anything* with the board at all.

        Antonio
         
Received on Thu Oct 04 2001 - 13:27:50 BST