Comment by monocasa
7 years ago
I was under the impression that Linux did care about the underlying PALcode, requiring the version originally meant for Tru64?
7 years ago
I was under the impression that Linux did care about the underlying PALcode, requiring the version originally meant for Tru64?
IIRC it is slightly more complex: the Tru64 callPAL API is the common subset of all the three variants (VMS/Tru64/NT), but the NT/AlphaBIOS has slightly incompatible ABI which Linux can detect and work around. And also IIRC original Linux port to Alpha expected the NT PALcode, which makes sense given the fact that DEC sold systems that didn't have SRM in PROM (ie. Multia and a-series PWS) and thus only supported NT or Linux.