1    Introduction

This chapter explains the New Hardware Delivery (NHD) process and describes the contents of the NHD-5 kit.

All system hardware requires supporting modules in the operating system kernel. Without this kernel support, the operating system cannot interact with the hardware and may fail to function altogether.

A New Hardware Delivery (NHD) kit includes kernel modules that let your system support new or upgraded hardware. The kit is distributed on CD-ROM and also can be downloaded from the World Wide Web.

NHD lets you install new hardware support without reinstalling the base operating system. However, you must reboot your system to build a kernel that includes the modules that support your new hardware. The bootlink process builds a generic kernel in memory, using generic kernel modules along with those included in your NHD kit. This bootlinked kernel is not written to disk, but allows the boot utility to include the hardware support modules into your running kernel.

Note

If you need to boot genvmunix after you have installed hardware support, your system will not recognize the hardware you installed with NHD. To access all of the kernel modules supplied by genvmunix and NHD, use the following command to boot /GENERIC:

>>> boot -fi GENERIC

The NHD-5 release includes support for the following hardware:

1.1    AlphaServer/AlphaStation DS25 System

The AlphaServer/AlphaStation DS25 system is provided in either a tower configuration with expanded storage capacity or as a rack-mounted system. It supports up to two Alpha 21264C processors at speeds up to 1,000 MHz with 8 MB level 2 dual data rate (DDR) cache per processor, and four 125 MHz PCI buses. This system includes dual Ethernet adapters (10/100 and 10/100/1000), dual UltraSCSI adapters, a 32X recordable CD drive, and a remote management console (RMC) for environmental monitoring. The DS25 system can support up to 16 GB of 125 to 133 MHz SDRAM memory in sixteen 200-pin dual inline memory modules (DIMMs) and provides six 64-bit PCI slots (both 33 MHz and 66 MHz) for I/O expansion.

The differences between the AlphaServer and AlphaStation configurations consist of the factory installed software (FIS) and the number of included user licenses. See your DS25 system documentation for more information.

The following are the orderable part numbers for Tru64 UNIX DS25 systems with different memory options:

Table 1-1:  Supported DS25 System Part Numbers

Memory Option AlphaServer DS25 AlphaStation DS25
512 MB DA-57AAA-CA DA-57AAA-CW
1 GB DA-57AAA-DA DA-57AAA-DW
2 GB DA-57AAA-EA DA-57AAA-EW
4 GB DA-57AAA-FA DA-57AAA-FW

1.2    Tigon3 Gigabit Network Interface Adapter

The Tigon3 gigabit network interface adapter is a 10/100/1000 base-T full/half duplex device. NHD-5 supports the LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) implementation of the Tigon3 as one of the two integral Ethernet adapters on the DS25 system.

Caution

The Tigon3 gigabit network interface adapter support in NHD-5 is qualified for network interface, and is not yet qualified for cluster interconnect.

The bcm(7) and sysattrs_bcm(5) reference pages are new for NHD-5. Table 1-4 shows the location of these reference page files in the NHD-5 kit distribution.

Table 1-2:  Locations of Tigon3 reference page Files

File Description
./DOC/man7/bcm.* bcm(7) reference page in source, HTML, PDF, PostScript, and text format
./DOC/man5/sysattrs_bcm.* sysattrs_bcm(5) reference page in source, HTML, PDF, PostScript, and text format

1.3    Recordable CD

Recordable CD (CD-R) drives provide writable media for systems without diskette drives. They also can be used to move up to 650 MB of data from one system to another in a format supported by multiple operating systems. For NHD-5, recordable CD drives are supported on DS25 systems.

NHD-5 support for CD-R drives is provided by an updated mkisofs utility and a new cdrecord command:

1.4    Smart Array 5300A RAID Controllers

The Smart Array (SA) 5300A series RAID controllers are two-channel (128 MB memory) and four-channel (256 MB memory) Ultra3 SCSI hard drive array controllers with battery-backed cache. The SA5300A series controllers support Ultra3 LVD SCSI technology for improved data transfer rates (160 MB/second per channel) and are backward compatible with devices using older SCSI technologies.

The following are the orderable part numbers for SA5300A series RAID controllers: