need some advice on some VAX boards ... - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

4 Oct 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