OpenBSD 7.2 on Alpha

Good Morning All,

I have become the proud owner of an AlphaServer 4100 that is in very good condition.  System has two 300mhz processors and 1GB of RAM.
I have one SCSI shelf connected to the qlogic controller that came with the system.  I have one 9.1GB disk in slot 0 of the shelf.
The system has it's original SCSI cdrom that is connected to the integrated system SCSI controller on the mainboard.

I have been playing around with it for several days and have had great success so far.
- Tru64 installs and boots fine, but as you can imagine, is a bit dated
- NetBSD 9.3 installs and boots fine, but only has single processor support

I am trying to get OpenBSD 7.2 to run on the system. I have updated the system Alpha firmware to the latest version that I could find which I think is v7.3.
The system will boot the OpenBSD 7.2 installer off dka500 with no problems.  The installer runs, finds sd0, creates the necessary partitions and extracts OpenBSD to the SCSI hard disk.  The kernel is relinked and no errors are shown at any point during the install.

The problem occurs on initial boot.  The system will read sd0 and starts the boot process.  The kernel seems to load fine.  I have been a UNIX/Linux admin for about 15 - 20 years...  and I think my experience has given me enough knowledge to make a guess that the problem is occurring when the kernel attempts to mount / as read/write but I could be wrong....  my experience is mostly with Solaris, AIX, RHEL and Ubuntu.  Not that familiar with OpenBSD so I apologize if this is a newbie mistake.

The last thing that kernel does successfully is scan for hardware.  I can see sd0 showing up in dmesg as being discovered. The last message that shows a successful operation is " scsibus4 at softraid0: 256 targets "  the next message is:

" Stopped at  __bwx_switch0=0x8:   call_pal osf1_rdval   "

I thought this might be related to OpenBSD not finding the disk labels properly so I booted the install disk again and used the shell to chroot sd0a to / and edited fstab.  I commented out the lines that used the UUID and created new lines for the entries using the traditional /dev/sd0* entries.  This didn't help.  I also tried booting bsd.sp instead of .mp to see if this changed things, it does not.

I can certainly provide more information and I don't expect someone to "fix" this for me, but some guidance would be appreciated.  I have an AlphaServer 2100 as well but I have not tried to power that one on yet.  My intention was to install OpenVMS on that one, but if you think it would be more successful, I can use that one for OpenBSD instead.  

Thanks Everyone and Happy 2023!
-M (Mark, NL Canada)

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