Alphabios release Notes

The AlphaBIOS Release Notes document fixes, feature changes, and problems discovered since the last AlphaBIOS Configuration Guide was published. For more detailed information about installing and using AlphaBIOS, download the AlphaBIOS Configuration Guide from http://www.windows.digital.com/support/driver.asp.

AlphaBIOS has scheduled and unscheduled (out-of-cycle) releases. Out-of-cycle releases are for new products or subsets of products, and quarterly releases are for all AlphaBIOS products.

Quarterly releases support the following products:

• 
  AlphaPC 164LX
  
• 
  AlphaPC 164SX
  
• 
  AlphaPC 264DP
  
• 
  AlphaServer 800
  
• 
  AlphaServer DS20
  
• 
  AlphaServer 1000 5/xxx
  
• 
  AlphaServer 1000A 5/xxx
  
• 
  AlphaServer 1200
  
• 
  AlphaServer 4000
  
• 
  AlphaServer 4100
  
• 
  AlphaServer 8200 and 8400
  
• 
  AlphaStation 255
  
• 
  AlphaStation 600A
  
• 
  Alpha XL 300
  
• 
  Alpha XL 366
  
• 
  Alpha XL 433
  
• 
  DIGITAL Personal Workstation
  
• 
  DIGITAL Ultimate Workstation
  
• 
  DIGITAL Server 3000/3300
  
• 
  DIGITAL Server 5000/5300
  
• 
  DIGITAL Server 7000/7300
  

AlphaBIOS 5.68 Release Overview

Support for New Hardware

Support for Windows 2000 Features

Serviceability Support

Configuration Enhancements for Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)

Fixes Included in AlphaBIOS 5.68

Universal Serial Bus (USB) Devices

• 
  Initialize the USB port properly.
  

Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI)

• 
  Include all ACPI information required to boot Windows 2000.
  
• 
  For AlphaPC 264DP and AlphaServer DS20, check for a video card before trying to get PCI configuration information about a video card.
  
• 
  If a parallel port is configured in standard mode, do not report that an ECP port is present. Similarly, if a parallel port is configured as an ECP port, do not report that a parallel port is present.
  
• 
  Exit the configuration mode in the SMC before returning the device status for COM1, COM2, or a floppy disk drive
  
• 
  Change the key value of the ACPI BIOS node to zero. This value is what Windows 2000 expects.
  
• 
  Add AlphaBIOS support for ACPI for booting Windows 2000.
  

Windows 2000 uses ACPI to provide operating system-directed power management. For more information about ACPI, see http://www.teleport.com/~acpi/press.htm

PCI

• 
  Enable 64-bit PCI after warm starts in AlphaServer 800 and DIGITAL Server 3300 systems.
  
• 
  Enable SERR when an Alteon Gigabit ACEnic (1Gb Ethernet card) is the only card on the PCI bus; otherwise, disable SERR when this card is not the only one on the bus.
  
• 
  Abbreviate terms on the PCI Config menu to prevent truncation of those terms.
  
• 
  Add PCI configuration failure warnings to AlphaBIOS. On the PCI menu, highlight the PCI devices that had resource allocation failures so that the user can go to the advanced PCI menu for those devices and identify the resources that could not be allocated by AlphaBIOS.
  
• 
  Change AlphaBIOS PCI initialization and error handling to reflect multiple processors for PCI I/O.
  
• 
  Correct the regression introduced by defining BAD_ADDRESS_REGISTER as 0xDeadBeef by redefining BAD_ADDRESS_REGISTER as zero. This correction prevents the x86 emulator from interpreting 0xDeadBeef as a valid address for PCI devices that had resource allocation failures.
  

• 
  Add support for Ultra DMA with the AcerLabs IDE controller, and update the PCI configuration code to support the Polaris core logic and the Acer Labs PCI-ISA bridge chip. This includes the following PCI devices:
  

Polaris System Controller (PSC)

AcerLabs m1543C PCI-ISA Bridge

AcerLabs m5229 IDE Controller

AcerLabs m5237 USB

AcerLabs m7101 PMU

Other

• 
  Update the DHCP client by removing code that obtains the server IP address from the option field of the DHCP packet.
  
• 
  Set the DHCP client to get the TFTP server IP address from the server field and do not allow the IP address to be overwritten with the server name. Adjust the UDP to read the size from UPD header.
  
• 
  Add a Reset routine and change the DC21X4 Driver Entry and Initialize routine, allowing the driver to initialize a network card that was not initialized at start up or to reinitialize a network card after it was shut down.
  
• 
  Add double error halt logging to HAL, AlphaBIOS, and the Windows 2000 event log.
  

• 
  On the AlphaServer 1000A Model 5 platform, prevent a black-screen hang in the transition from HAL via PAL to AlphaBIOS by implementing a warm-start-enable option. Include in CMOS Advanced Settings a "Warm Restart" option under CMOS Settings, Advanced Setup that can set the Environmental Variable WARMREBOOT to YES or NO.
  
• 
  During debug, update the error logging callback API to allow frame sizes to be transferred between the HAL and AlphaBIOS.
  
• 
  Add error halt logging support to AlphaServer 8200 and 8400.
  

• 
  Ensure that “Power-up Memory Test” changes in advanced CMOS setup are preserved when saved.
  

Known Issues in AlphaBIOS 5.68

When AlphaBIOS 5.68 is first installed, SCSIBIOS emulation is disabled by default. This prevents undesirable changes to changes to system behavior. You can enable SCSBIOS emulation through the AlphaBIOS Advanced CMOS Settings Menu.

You might encounter the following issues after enabling SCSIBIOS emulation:

• 
  The first time SCSIBIOS emulation is enabled, you might be prompted to run the SCSIBIOS configuration utility to repair the SCSI adapter’s NVRAM settings. Run the configuration utility as instructed.
  
• 
  For systems that contain a Qlogic-based PCI adapter in addition to an on-board Qlogic SCSI device, you will notice that the system takes a long time to complete initialization of the Qlogic PCI adapter. Until this problem is resolved, you can minimize the impact of this problem by enabling SCSIBIOS emulation for Qlogic-based controllers only when it is necessary to run the Qlogic configuration utility.
  

Known Issues for AlphaServer 1200, AlphaServer 4000/4100, DIGITAL Server 5000/5300, DIGITAL Server 7100/7300, & Digital Ultimate Workstation

• 
  You might not be able to exit SCSIBIOS configuration utilities. When attempting to exit a SCSIBIOS configuration utility, the system may hang. To work around this issue, either perform a system reset or disable the “Warm Reboot” Advanced CMOS setting. Note that disabling “Warm Reboot” will cause AlphaBIOS to perform a full system reset during NT reboots.
  

Known Issues for Alpha XL 300/366/433 AlphaStation 600, AlphaServer 600A. AlphaServer 1000, AlphaServer 1000A & AlphaServer 800

• 
  When running SCSIBIOS emulation for the first time, you might be required to run the SCSIBIOS configuration utility to repair the adapter’s NVRAM settings.
  
• 
  When Qlogic-based SCSI plug-in adapters are installed on systems with on-board Qlogic devices, Qlogic SCSIBIOS initialization will take up to two minutes, with one additional minute for each adapter installed. This problem is inherent in Qlogic devices and has no solution.
  

AlphaBIOS 5.67 Release Overview

• 
  DIGITAL Personal Workstation
  
• 
  DIGITAL Ultimate Workstation
  
• 
  AlphaServer 1200
  
• 
  AlphaServer 4000
  
• 
  AlphaServer 4100
  
• 
  DIGITAL Server 5000/5300
  
• 
  DIGITAL Server 7000/7300
  

PCI Configuration Enhancements

Previously, when AlphaBIOS encountered a non-compliant PCI resource, the entire configuration for the non-compliant device was filled with zeros, thereby disabling the device. AlphaBIOS was changed to behave as follows:

• 
  Non-compliant PCI resources will be invalidated. Non-compliant resources will be written with the hexadecimal number 0xdeadbeef. Writing this unique value provides users with the ability to identify invalid PCI resources from the AlphaBIOS configuration menu.
  
• 
  All other settings will be honored. AlphaBIOS will try to assign to the device all PCI resources not identified as non-compliant. This will enable the device to function under Windows NT. The degree of functionality is dependent on the device.
  

NT Serviceability Support

• 
  DIGITAL Ultimate Workstation and AlphaServer 1200
  
• 
  AlphaServer 4000
  
• 
  AlphaServer 4100
  
• 
  DIGITAL Server 5300
  
• 
  DIGITAL Server 7300
  

Post Windows NT 5.0 (Beta 2) Support

Fixes Included in AlphaBIOS 5.67

Fixes Common to all Platforms

PCI Configuration

• 
  Relax error handling of non-compliant PCI resources.
  

NT 5.0 (Beta 2):

• 
  Add support for the NT 5.0 advanced boot configuration menu (Safeboot). This menu is entered by pressing F5 or F8 from the boot selection menu and provides advanced boot options that enhance the repair of Windows NT 5.0. Entering this menu for non-NT5 boot selections has no impact on system boot behavior. Although this feature was not officially supported on Alpha systems for NT 5.0 (Beta 2), latent support in Windows NT 5.0 (Beta 2) exists. See the Windows NT 5.0 (Beta 2) release notes for more information.
  

Fixes for AlphaServer 1200, AlphaServer 4000/4100, DIGITAL Server 5000/5300, DIGITAL Server 7100/7300, & Digital Ultimate Workstation

• 
  Add latent NT serviceability support. See “AlphaBIOS 5.67 Release Overview” for more details.
  
• 
  Add SRM-dependency server-management warning to inform customers of potentially invalid firmware configurations. See “AlphaBIOS 5.67 Release Overview” for more details.
  

Known Issues in AlphaBIOS 5.67

Known Issues common to all AlphaBIOS products

• 
  The PCI configurator enhancement for this release may cause problems for certain PCI configurations behind a PCI-to-PCI bridge (PPB). One side effect of the enhancement is error handling, where PCI configuration PCI IO or PCI memory resource requests cannot be satisfied for a device installed in a PPB slot. If this occurs, the PCI IO or PCI memory resources for all devices behind the PPB are invalidated. Invalidation is performed by writing the hexadecimal value 0xdeadbeef to PCI IO or PCI memory resources for all devices behind the PPB. If such configurations include devices that advertise a ROM BIOS, then AlphaBIOS may crash during the BIOS emulation. The BIOS emulator will misinterpret the value 0xdeadbeef as a valid PCI address and attempt to read this address. This problem will be fixed in the next release.
  
• 
  All known issues for the AlphaBIOS 5.66 release still exist in AlphaBIOS 5.67.
  
• 
  
  

Known Issues for AlphaServer 1200, AlphaServer 4000/4100, DIGITAL Server 5000/5300, DIGITAL Server 7100/7300, & Digital Ultimate Workstation

When updating the system firmware to obtain NT serviceability support, take the following steps:

• 
  Update the SRM to v5.3 using the LFU.
  
• 
  Reboot the system so that we are now running SRM v5.3.
  
• 
  Update the AlphaBIOS to v5.67 or greater using the LFU. SRM v5.3 will put AlphaBIOS in the new flash location.
  
• 
  When the SRM required for NT serviceability support is made available, more details will be provided on how to update the firmware configuration.
  

AlphaBIOS 5.66 Release Overview

Supported Products

SCSIBIOS Emulation

• 
  Alpha XL 300/366/433
  
• 
  AlphaStation 600 5/266, 300, 333
  
• 
  AlphaServer 600A 5/500
  
• 
  AlphaServer 1000 5/266, 300
  
• 
  AlphaServer 1000A 5/266, 300
  
• 
  AlphaServer 800 5/333, 400, 600
  
• 
  DIGITAL Server 3000/3300
  

Enhanced PCI DMA Mode Support

To use the enhanced DMA functionality, your system must have Windows NT 4.0 with OEM HAL Revision D or later installed. You can avoid manually installing the updated HAL file by installing Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4 when it becomes available.

• 
  Legacy Mode – use the legacy (original) settings with fixed window base and size. This mode may be required for certain non-compliant PCI devices.
  
• 
  Dynamic Mode – Dynamically size the Master DMA-window proportional to the amount of physical memory present in the system. Relocate the DMA-window base address to a location compatible with the system IO address space. This DMA mode is the default setting.
  
• 
  Maximum Mode – Select the maximum size, 512 MB, for the Master DMA-window. Relocate the DMA-window base address to a location compatible with the system IO address space. This mode may be required for large PCI device configurations.
  

Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2 Support

Fixes Included in AlphaBIOS 5.66

Fixes Common to all Platforms

SCSIBIOS Emulation:

• 
  Fix the SCSIBIOS emulator to support configurations with more than ten drives when an AdvanSys SCSI adapter is installed in the system.
  
• 
  Change the SCSBIOS emulated memory back to 512K to fix long KZPCM SCSIBIOS initialization times.
  
• 
  Remove interrupt-bitmask checking in SCSIBIOS emulator to fix problems with entering the Qlogic SCSIBIOS configuration utility when the Qlogic installed behind an Adaptec SCSI controller.
  

Network Support:

• 
  Optimize the speed of the AlphaBIOS DC21X4 network driver, including use transmit-threshold mode and reduce minimum wait time in polling to finish transmit.
  
• 
  Fix a check-sum error in the network file-cache that occurred after loading a smaller image with same file name from network.
  
• 
  Reduce the TFTP server overhead by modifying the AlphaBIOS TFTP client to terminate the TFTP touch-file transaction. This will increase the reliability of TFTP file transactions.
  
• 
  Fix miscellaneous AlphaBIOS network bugs.
  

NT 5.0 (Beta 2):

• 
  Update the AlphaBIOS ATAPI IDE Miniport driver to NT 4.0 (1381) version. For NT 5.0 and certain NT 4.0 configurations, the new driver is required to support AlphaBIOS clean IDE device reset after NT shutdown. The previous AlphaBIOS driver version was not able to reset devices that NT had configured in bus-master DMA modes, resulting in the device disappearing under AlphaBIOS.
  
• 
  Change the AlphaBIOS heap-sizing algorithm to reserve a maximum of 8 MB of space for AlphaBIOS heap. This restriction reduces the memory footprint of AlphaBIOS and is necessary to support NT 5.0 hibernation features.
  
• 
  To prevent conflicts with NT 5.0 network PnP support, shutdown the AlphaBIOS network device prior to loading NT.
  

CMOS Setup:

• 
  Add the Master DMA Window Mode setting to Advanced CMOS Settings for platforms that support PCI Scatter-Gather DMA.
  
• 
  Align Advanced CMOS setting fields and single space Advanced CMOS entries to allow enlargement of help window.
  
• 
  Due to NVRAM space limitations, reduce the maximum number of Operating System (OS) boot selections from four to three. Attempting to install more than three instances of Window NT on a system will now result in failure to create the OS boot selection.
  

Miscellaneous:

• 
  Pass the PCI device present bitmap to HAL for all products. AlphaBIOS calculates this bitmap during PCI device configuration. By passing the bitmap to NT, we reduce boot time by saving the HAL from having to recalculate this bitmap.
  

Fixes for AlphaServer 1200, AlphaServer 4000/4100, DIGITAL Server 5000/5300, DIGITAL Server 7100/7300, & Digital Ultimate Workstation

• 
  Add support for 8 MB BCache size CPU daughter cards by reporting the proper Bcache size to NT.
  
• 
  Implement a workaround to support Qlogic SCSIBIOS configure utility.
  

Fixes for the Digital Personal Workstation

• 
  On systems with an on-board Cypress 82CY693U IDE controller, implement a workaround to prevent the Windows NT 4.0 ATAPI miniport driver from generating NT EventLog entries. The workaround will prevent the second IDE PCI function from responding to PCI configuration accesses under NT. Note this does not prevent devices on the second IDE channel from functioning under NT because the IDE controller is configured in legacy mode. When configured in legacy mode, access to devices on both channels is supported from the first PCI IDE function. All necessary device configurations for the second channel is performed under AlphaBIOS.
  

Fixes for Alpha XL 300/366/433 AlphaStation 600, AlphaServer 600A. AlphaServer 1000, AlphaServer 1000A & AlphaServer 800

• 
  Add SCSIBIOS emulation support for CIA-based products.
  
• 
  Disable SCSIBIOS emulation support by default on CIA-based products.
  

Known Issues in AlphaBIOS 5.66

When AlphaBIOS 5.66 is first installed, SCSIBIOS emulation is disabled by default. This prevents undesirable changes to changes to system behavior. You can enable SCSBIOS emulation through the AlphaBIOS Advanced CMOS Settings Menu.

You might encounter the following issues after enabling SCSIBIOS emulation:

• 
  The first time SCSIBIOS emulation is enabled, you might be prompted to run the SCSIBIOS configuration utility to repair the SCSI adapter’s NVRAM settings. Run the configuration utility as instructed.
  
• 
  For systems that contain a Qlogic-based PCI adapter in addition to an on-board Qlogic SCSI device, you will notice that the system takes a long time to complete initialization of the Qlogic PCI adapter. Until this problem is resolved, you can minimize the impact of this problem by enabling SCSIBIOS emulation for Qlogic-based controllers only when it is necessary to run the Qlogic configuration utility.
  

Known Issues for AlphaServer 1200, AlphaServer 4000/4100, DIGITAL Server 5000/5300, DIGITAL Server 7100/7300, & Digital Ultimate Workstation

• 
  You might not be able to exit SCSIBIOS configuration utilities. When attempting to exit a SCSIBIOS configuration utility, the system may hang. To work around this issue, either perform a system reset or disable the “Warm Reboot” Advanced CMOS setting. Note that disabling “Warm Reboot” will cause AlphaBIOS to perform a full system reset during NT reboots.
  
• 
  Qlogic SCSIBIOS initialization takes longer when the Qlogic is installed behind an Adaptec-based controller and SCSIBIOS emulation is enabled for both adapter types. To work-around this issue, only enable SCSIBIOS emulation when it is necessary to run the adapter’s Auto-configuration utility.
  

Known Issues for Alpha XL 300/366/433 AlphaStation 600, AlphaServer 600A. AlphaServer 1000, AlphaServer 1000A & AlphaServer 800

• 
  When running SCSIBIOS emulation for the first time, you might be required to run the SCSIBIOS configuration utility to repair the adapter’s NVRAM settings.
  
• 
  When Qlogic-based SCSI plug-in adapters are installed on systems with on-board Qlogic devices, Qlogic SCSIBIOS initialization will take up to two minutes, with one additional minute for each adapter installed.