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+--- Thread: Multia (alpha) innards replacement (/showthread.php?tid=782)
Multia (alpha) innards replacement - JeffJibson - 04-26-2016
I have an old Multia. As commonly happens to them, it overheated. I kept the old system thinking that it's case would make a nice enclosure for something. Then, SBCs started coming out. I thought when a cheaper SBC with a 64bit RISC processor came out, that would be good fit.
Multias are DEC Alpha based systems. The do not have a BIOS, but SRM and ARC firmware. UEFI and the command line EFI shell seem to have come from it's design. It is where I really started using Linux, first RedHat (not EL) version 6 then Gentoo. Alpha's typically used OSF/1 (Digital UNIX) or OpenVMS.
When I read this article: The Pine A64 is about to become the cheapest ARM 64-bit platform to run Docker and looked into FEL, I thought, here is my what belongs in the old Multia.
So, my thought is to treat the Pine 64+ (2Gig) as the base of a home-brew like system using another SBC, maybe a Pi0, for FEL, to act as it's SRM (boot loader and shell). I have an old Radio Shack keyboard that would be fun to wire through an Atmel AVR as a keyboard controller. And to reflect it's OSF/1 heritage, run FreeBSD on it. It will need other support like MAX232 to connect Pine's TTL serial to the RS-232 port.
RE: Multia (alpha) innards replacement - ssvb - 06-20-2016
FEL is not supposed to be used for booting the board normally. It's in fact designed to be a recovery mode, which requires communication with a desktop PC (or another ARM board) over a USB cable. Yes, you can use another board as a supplier of the bootloader, but sunxi-tools need some improvements to support this use case well.