AMD64 box

[Matthew Dillon]

    Hello everyone!  I got my AMD64 box today!  Yeh!

    The first order of business will be to make it work with a standard
    boot and standard peripherals.  I enabled netbooting and it got half
    way through a standard (32 bit) boot right off the bat before panic'ing
    so that's a very good sign!  It recognized the USB and IEEE-1594 ports
    and found something like five or six PCI busses, though I've no idea 
    whether any of it actually works yet.

    There are a lot of new things in this system including a new way to
    configure APICs, SATA drives, and of course 64 bit mode, so I hope
    to get all these things up to snuff in the next few weeks.  To kill
    a flock of birds with one stone so to speak.

    I almost had a heart attack hooking it up, though... I put the thing
    together and then realize I hadn't gotten any ram for it!  Oh no!  But
    it turns out that the EPIA M-9000 boxes use the same kind of DDR SDRAM
    that the AMD uses so, whew!

    The alpha and Itanium non-withstanding, the AMD64 is the first 'consumer'
    64 bit machine in mass production.  I am already impressed!

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>