From owner-freebsd-arch Sat Aug 19 12:39:31 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from zippy.osd.bsdi.com (zippy.osd.bsdi.com [204.216.27.228]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8EDFF37B43F; Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:39:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zippy.osd.bsdi.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA87666; Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:38:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.osd.bsdi.com) To: Marius Bendiksen Cc: "Robert S. Sciuk" , freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: your mail In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 19 Aug 2000 21:15:26 +0200." Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:38:27 -0700 Message-ID: <87663.966713907@localhost> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > The Intel platform would seem to be dying, and we'd do well to port to > better platforms. Our alpha code is ages cleaner than the x86 code, at > least. Heh. I'm not sure I'd share your conclusion that "The Intel platform is dying" given the extreme growth and increased competition I've been seeing in that marketplace; there are even x86 compatible chips which are beginning to compete with the StrongARM in terms of price and power consumption, and let's not forget our friends at Transmeta driving the next generation of flat panel "Internet computing slates". Nonetheless, there's been a lot of discussion about porting FreeBSD to other architectures lately and everyone seems to come around to the same question: "What can I do?" Porting to a new architecture is a pretty straight-forward process which involves getting gcc and the toolchain to support the new architecture (David O'Brien has imported partial support for a number of non-x86 architectures already so talk to him if you want to coordinate your efforts) so you can actually compile things. Then one should go after locore.s and friends and start researching some of the first necessary device drivers, those usually including the system console and serial port drivers, so that you can get to the all-important single user shell prompt milestone. At that point, other people will tend to see your efforts as being "real" enough to get seriously involved in rounding out the device driver support and work on the next milestone, which is multi-user mode. :) If you're truly serious about seeing FreeBSD on a new architecture, that's what needs to happen. Volunteering to be a tester or rock polisher is kinda gratuitous until one or more people are already engaged in the process of tackling the toolchain and kernel bootstrap code. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message