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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) 
Reply-To: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 1996 13:17:21 -0800
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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