From owner-freebsd-alpha Wed May 8 5:47:57 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from duke.cs.duke.edu (duke.cs.duke.edu [152.3.140.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D8FAF37B409; Wed, 8 May 2002 05:47:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (grasshopper.cs.duke.edu [152.3.145.30]) by duke.cs.duke.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id IAA22593; Wed, 8 May 2002 08:47:48 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from gallatin@localhost) by grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (8.11.6/8.9.1) id g48ClIr73797; Wed, 8 May 2002 08:47:18 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) From: Andrew Gallatin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15577.7766.160517.751366@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 08:47:18 -0400 (EDT) To: John Baldwin Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: *bsd on srm-less alpha's In-Reply-To: References: <3CD8BADE.D7D0FC8C@mindspring.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 12) "Channel Islands" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org John Baldwin writes: > > On 08-May-2002 Terry Lambert wrote: > > Wilko Bulte wrote: > >> On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 10:36:39AM -0700, David O'Brien wrote: > >> > On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 04:34:48PM +0200, Mark Santcroos wrote: > >> > > My goal is to first get a kernel running on a modified milo and after > >> > > that > >> > > to create a selfhosted bsd loader. > >> > > >> > There has been some work on this -- see /sys/boot/arc/ > >> > >> But be prepared to have a lot of work to do yourself. > > > > Particularly in the VM system. With different microcode, you > > get digfferent machine instructions. FreeBSD relies on a > > number of instructions which act a particular way because they > > are implemented in the SRM that way. > > Umm, we use instructions from PALcode, not from SRM. Now I think SRM > contains certain versions of PALcode (VMS and Unix ones) whereas the > ARC stuff uses the NT PALcode. You would need to change more than VM > though. PAL is used for context switching and for enable/disable > interrupts, etc. He's talking about using MILO, which, at least as of 2.1.13, uses the OSF PALcode. What nobody knows is if the PALcode in milo is close enough to the "real" OSF PALcode used by the SRM for it to be usable by FreeBSD. It certainly seems close, as it has the text "SRM" and "OSF" littered all over it. Now, I've heard various people talk about how we need certain VM related PALcode functions that aren't avalable in the MILO palcode, However, nobody has mentioned exactly which function this is, and I think this might be an urban legend. I do agree that getting this to work just isn't worth the time and effort. Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message