Alpha/Linux Wiki

Eiger is the codename of a 21264 single board computer in the PICMG form factor, the EV6 successor to the Takara. It began as part of Digital's and Compaq's Modular Computing Components line, was sold by SMART Modular Technologies as the SMARTengine 21264 PCI/ISA SBC, and later by Force Computers as the Flexor A264/500. ^{1) 2)} Jay Estabrook noted that, like the Takara, it could be had as a board without a system, but never in the quantities of the AlphaPC 164LX and 164SX. ³⁾

• One 500 MHz 21264 CPU on the A264/500 ⁴⁾ with 2 MiB of cache ⁵⁾
• A design "based around the DP264 except it has one p-chip" ⁶⁾
• A separate I/O card carries the SROM, the PROM, the NVRAM, and other components needed to boot, so a CPU card alone does not work ⁷⁾
• Cypress 693 IDE controller, ⁸⁾ and an onboard USB port ⁹⁾
• Sold with backplanes such as a seven-slot, 64-bit PCI backplane, with up to four PCI-to-PCI bridges on the backplane ^{10) 11)}

The kernel reads a register at I/O port 0x502 to learn how many bridges the backplane has, from 0 to 4, and treats bridges in the highest slots as built in. ¹²⁾ The SRM console assigns the interrupts of option cards; Linux reads each card's interrupt line register and subtracts 0x80. ¹³⁾

The kernel's HWRPB system type is 37, ¹⁴⁾ and Tru64 UNIX lists it as "DMCC_EV6 EV6 Eiger DMCC passive bacplane system". ¹⁵⁾

The console reports itself as "FORCE 21264 Alpha PCI/ISA SBC Console V5.7-2 built May 16 2001", ¹⁶⁾ and an SMARTengine board of 2000 ran "SMARTengine/Alpha 21264 PCI/ISA SBC console v5.6-6903", which printed "ERROR: ISA table corrupt!" at boot; the owner's attempt to clear it by running init failed. ¹⁷⁾ The board also runs AlphaBIOS. Force told one owner that SRM could not see devices behind a PCI-to-PCI bridge, and his board halted at "E7" until then. ¹⁸⁾

Linux supports the Eiger with CONFIG_ALPHA_EIGER or a generic kernel, which selects the Eiger machine vector; ¹⁹⁾ it boots from SRM with aboot. The option builds the Tsunami code and, like the DP264, offers an EV67 setting. ²⁰⁾ No report of a current kernel on an Eiger has been found; the last is a 4.19 release candidate in 2018.

• An engineer at SMART Modular added Eiger to the kernel, first as local changes to 2.2.13 ²¹⁾ and then in the 2.2.14 release, ²²⁾ where Rich Payne identified it as one of the SMART Modular machines. ²³⁾ The 2.4.0 configuration help named it "SMARTEngine SBC models". ²⁴⁾
• Debian's installer manual for sarge listed the SMARTengine 21264 PCI/ISA SBC under the Tsunami subarchitecture, with no MILO. ²⁵⁾
• Red Hat 7.0 installed on a 512 MiB board with an onboard USB port, using a serial console. Red Hat 7.1 panicked at boot. ²⁶⁾
• Tru64 UNIX 5.1B installed on an A264/500. ²⁷⁾
• An LSI 875 SCSI controller on 2.2.20 reached about 20 MB/s per disk, but a four-disk software RAID 0 gave only 32 to 33 MB/s. ²⁸⁾

• IRQ table size: the Eiger vector allows 128 interrupts, but from at least Linux 3.18 the kernel was built with only 64, and the Symbios SCSI controller could not get its interrupts (a working 2.6.26 boot gave it IRQs 64 and 65). Meelis Roos fixed this so that 4.19-rc7 booted on a Force Flexor A264. ²⁹⁾
• 2.4 kernel panic: in 2002 Linux 2.4.18 and 2.4.20 panicked at boot with "Unable to handle kernel paging request", while 2.2.16, 2.2.20, and 2.2.22 ran. Building with gcc 3.2 did not help. ^{30) 31) 32)} The reporter found no other Eiger owner running Linux. The 2018 fix above may bear on it, but no report ties the two together.
• Video cards: on a 2.2.16 kernel, programs that take control of the graphics card (X, SVGATextMode, vgalib) were denied permission with a Matrox Millennium, a Diamond FireGL 1000pro, an ELSA Synergy, and an ELSA Gloria L/M, and the framebuffer did not work. No answer was posted. ³³⁾
• PCI sound card interrupts: an Ensoniq ES1370 in any slot tried to use "irq 4294967168", which is 2^32 minus 128, and failed to load; an ISA Sound Blaster clone worked. Jay Estabrook suspected either the Eiger support or the ES1370 driver, and added that the ES1370 has DMA problems on Alpha. ^{34) 35) 36)} That value is the result eiger_map_irq would give for a card whose interrupt line register held 0, since it subtracts 0x80.
• IDE speed: the onboard IDE ran at about 3 MB/s. ³⁷⁾
• Missing I/O card: CPU cards were sold separately from their I/O cards, and a CPU card without one cannot boot. ³⁸⁾

SMART Modular announced a "third generation" 21264 PCI/ISA single board computer in October 1999, ³⁹⁾ the same month that its engineer said he wanted to build the Eiger into the kernel source tree. ⁴⁰⁾ Compaq sold the OEM group to SMART Modular in July 1999, and Solectron bought SMART Modular and Force Computers within weeks of each other, ⁴¹⁾ and by November 2000 the line belonged to Force Computers, ⁴²⁾ which sold the A264/500 with 500 MHz and 2 MiB of cache. ⁴³⁾ Boards reached the secondary market by 2002, one at about 70 US dollars, ⁴⁴⁾ and a complete A264/500 system on a seven-slot backplane with 1 GiB of memory was offered for sale in 2003. ⁴⁵⁾