From owner-freebsd-ppc  Tue May 30 17: 3:53 2000
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Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 20:05:42 -0400
From: Christopher A Shepherd <cshepher@linux-florida.com>
Message-Id: <200005310005.e4V05gM17560@intel.linux-florida.com>
To: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org
Subject: FreeBSD-ppc ideas
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Hiyas,

Haven't seen a lot of traffic on this list, but I'd like to add support to
the idea of porting FreeBSD over to the powerpc. To this end, a lot of work
has already been done for us (yes I know, we don't just want to recycle
code), specifically..

- NetBSD has done the bootstrap, walking up the OF device tree and
  discovering hardware on it, as has LinuxPPC. I don't think NetBSD
  has the Uni-North bridge support that LinuxPPC has, however. But I think
  Grackle and Uni-North are the only ones we're looking to support.

- NetBSD and OpenBSD, as far as I know, rely on Open Firmware to do the
  keyboard and display I/O, which probably isn't what we want. But perhaps
  it is, and X should be left up to XFree86 servers (which, I believe, now
  support the ATI chipsets).

I use NetBSD as the example here, because (and I'm guessing here) I believe
it uses the proper calling interface for functions (passing values in the
proper registers, setting up the stack frame properly, etc), whereas I
believe OpenBSD has adopted AIX's ABI.

So the first step is to import NetBSD's ppc/ directory into the tree and let
it run on the Open Firmware drivers until we get it fitting seamlessly with
the rest of FreeBSD. Since I really don't know what I'm talking about yet
with regard to FreeBSD's console drivers, I wouldn't know if we have to
write any USB (probably not?) or ATI drivers.

Has anyone started on this? I'm downloading the netbsd and freebsd trees
right now to see what's required on this step. My familiarity with the trees
is pretty low (I've used LinuxPPC thusfar), so I might be attempting something
idiotic.

-Chris


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