Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 14:53:18 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: thorpej@nas.nasa.gov Cc: terry@lambert.org, 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: <199612032153.OAA14706@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199612032117.NAA17498@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> from "Jason Thorpe" at Dec 3, 96 01:17:21 pm
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[ ... NetBSD PPC ... ] > 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. Yes. I was not saying that this is the wrong order in which to do things, only that what has been done is still non-trivial to complete. It is *not* a port (in my book) until it is not running through the ROM (I believe I/O must be single threaded through the ROM, which uses a number of register parameters. This is enough to make any hardware look more crappy than I am willing to let outside eyes see it). In any case, there *is* a port of NetBSD with native drivers, it's just not released, and has no working boot code outside a hosted card. If I consider the AIX code as a host environment, I'm almost that far on the PPCBug based Ultra 603/604 boards (Firepower/PowerStack systems). My main problem has been (and remains) lack of publically distributable PPCBug-based boot code, and that's for lack of PPCBug docs. One of my main hot buttons has been running FreeBSD x86 and AIX PPC programs. Without software, a port is pretty useless. It doesn't help that the last set of VM changes I rolled in from the x86 killed my ability to fork (I still have not investigated why). Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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