Re: [TUHS] lost ports

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 8:02 AM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: Clem, thanks for the correction. This leaves me wondering why I was so naive as to believe that fable from those guys we visited ... I suspect they did not know or were just lying to me, since the question came up in the context of LInuxBIOS for the 4-socket system (2048 of them were used in ASCI Q) and I doubt they wanted to hear about non-DEC firmware on that system. The SRM was a huge pain point on that machine and we hoped to replace it with something we could live with, but it was not to be. We did get LinuxBIOS on the 1-socket pizza box thanks to Eric Biederman and Linux NetworX, which we used to build a 128-node LinuxBIOS cluster. LinuxBIOS included a PALcode implementation. Which leads to a question ... Jon Hall used to tell me that DEC used SRM in general and PALcode in particular as competitive leverage with customers (i.e. DEC-based Alpha systems always had the latest SRM and PALcode, and non-DEC-based Alpha systems were always a few revs behind). Note this implies DEC as a systems vendor was competing with DEC Alpha chip customers who were systems vendors, which was a situation we've seen in practice with many vendors that sold chips and motherboards. Anyway, the question: with LinuxBIOS, we shipped a GPL-ed PALcode implementation. It was pretty dumb, it just did 1:1 virt to phys mapping for example, but it worked. I've always believed that was the only open source or at least GPL'ed PALcode out there -- can you tell me if I got this right? Thanks, it's always good to read your histories ... sorry this is not strictly a Unix history question but I've always wondered. ron