Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 10:15:34 +0200 From: Rink Springer <rink@freebsd.org> To: Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com> Cc: FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Porting FreeBSD to a new Architecture? Message-ID: <20070404081534.GC2546@rink.nu> In-Reply-To: <ef10de9a0704040023h65a5a2f7icc82f5f305ed2cee@mail.gmail.com> References: <ef10de9a0704040023h65a5a2f7icc82f5f305ed2cee@mail.gmail.com>
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Hi Nikolas, On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 02:23:44AM -0500, Nikolas Britton wrote: > I'm looking for documentation that could possibly help me port FreeBSD > to a new architecture. I'm mainly interested in how you guys did the > xbox and amd64 ports. i.e. x86 instruction set. I can answer the Xbox question for you... basically, what I did was get a good understanding of how the xbox internals worked (i.e. what the exact differences are between an ordinary PC and an Xbox). Based on this understanding, I patched the Xbox boot loader (Cromwell) so it could properly load FreeBSD ELF images. Once that was done, I worked my way up from the first piece of code executed (that is in i386/i386/locore.s). I crafted some assembly code which could control the Xbox LED's, and I used this to determine where the Xbox would crash... Once I got the initial machine-dependant stuff out of the way, I created a console driver so I could see what was going on (which I later on totally rewrote); and worked my way up from here... Expect a lot of painstaking debugging in the progress... Good luck! -- Rink P.W. Springer - http://rink.nu "It is such a quiet thing, to fall. But yet a far more terrible thing, to admit it." - Darth Traya
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