Date: Tue, 03 Dec 1996 13:17:21 -0800 From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: jehamby@lightside.com, mark@quickweb.com, jkh@time.cdrom.com, chuckr@glue.umd.edu, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD/Alpha (was Re: COMDEX trip report) Message-ID: <199612032117.NAA17498@lestat.nas.nasa.gov>
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On Mon, 2 Dec 1996 12:03:45 -0700 (MST) Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> wrote: > According to Carl S Shapiro <cshapiro@ic.sunysb.edu>, who, with > Thor Lancelot Simon, tried to obtain the JCC 4.4BSD-Lite port > CDROM [talking about Wolfgang's PPC code that was checked in]: > > | It does not seem to have any native drivers, and relies on the > | OpenFirmware to communciate with all of the machines devices. It is not > | much of a port if you ask me, but it is a start. I emailed Wolfgang > | Solfrank a while ago with repects to taking all of the work he has done > | and applying it to a BeBox port. He though it would take quite a bit of > | effort since there are no native drivers, and second, the BeBox can only > | boot OS's other than BeOS off of it's floppy (don't bounce buffer related > | issues come into play here?). It's true that OFW is used for all i/o. There are a couple of reasons for this: - It allows us to have a self-hosting port quickly. - It works on all OFW machines. NetBSD/powerpc will probably use a mechanism similar to NetBSD/alpha's for doing `native' drivers. Once the "which i/o bus implementation to pick" and the glue code is written, we get a whole slew of `native' drivers for free, because of our MI PCI/ISA implementation. Jason R. Thorpe thorpej@nas.nasa.gov NASA Ames Research Center Home: 408.866.1912 NAS: M/S 258-6 Work: 415.604.0935 Moffett Field, CA 94035 Pager: 415.428.6939
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