AlphaServer DS20E - Minimal iso failes to mount /dev/sr0

[cyborgyn]

Hi, I just got my hands on an AlphaServer DS20E, and instantly wanted to install gentoo on it. I realized with surprise, that the last minimal install ISO is dated back to 4th feb. Never mind, let's try - I thought.

It boots up, until the point, where it wants to mount /dev/sr0, and it just waits/hangs there infinitely.
I also tried the last available Debian on that, and managed to quickly install it on one of the disks (it somehow can handle CD/DVD drive without error). It is quite an old release dated back to probably 2012 or so, so I really wanted to put gentoo on that machine with fresh code on it.

What I did is: booted up & installed Debian (2.6.24 kernel), and DD-d the whole Gentoo minimal install CD to a HDD. When booted from that disk, gentoo started flawlessly, and currently is being installed (doing word update, which is quite heavy due to the lot of outdated packages found on the feb stage3).

I suspect, that the problem is the minimal ISO kernel uses the new IDE implementation, which doesn't work in this case with the CD/DVD drive (I have also swapped CD and DVD drives in the server to check, but nothing changed). Debian referring the CD as /dev/hda instead of /dev/sr0. I will try out (when I get there) on a kernel to compile the legacy IDE drivers to prove it. It's just a heads up, that probably the current minimal ISO is not booting an AlphaServer... Anybody else have experienced similar things?
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x86,x64,MIPS,PaRISC,Alpha

[cyborgyn]

What happened next, is here:
sys-boot/aboot failed to compile, however the very helpful guys on #gentoo-alpha IRC channel quickly fixed that (it was connected to recent GCC upgrade), so now if you emerge --sync, it will compile. It also works, just the stable gentoo-sources not.

Next the gentoo-sources stable (4.12.12) failed to compile, there was a typo in an EV67 assembly code in the kernel, which was fixed up streams (from 4.13). After correcting the bug manually, still had linking errors, so I decided to switch to 4.13.7 ~alpha version. It compiles, and works now.

Tried the legacy ata driver to reach the CDROM on /dev/hda, but it gives a segmentation fault first, and afterwards hangs the machine.
Tried the new libata implementation to reach the CDROM on /dev/sr0, but it also completely hangs my system (though revs up the drive).

This is it, so far.
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x86,x64,MIPS,PaRISC,Alpha

[cyborgyn]

finally figured out: for the boot kernel command line, add: libata.dma=0, and you are good to go... in PIO mode...
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x86,x64,MIPS,PaRISC,Alpha