Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1998 21:09:21 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: Matthew.Alton@anheuser-busch.com (Alton, Matthew) Cc: don@whtech.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Free BSD Port to new platform. (fwd) Message-ID: <199807262109.OAA16210@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <31B3F0BF1C40D11192A700805FD48BF90177661C@STLABCEXG011> from "Alton, Matthew" at Jul 24, 98 07:59:47 pm
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> With full access to the platform specs and the cooperation of design and > engineering people the project amounts to rewriting the hardware-dependent > portions of the code, resolving issues like endianness, alignment.... > and writing drivers for your new devices. It's a substantial project but > the process is quite well-defined. The NetBSD people have a small jump > here with the MIPS-specific work largely out of the way. The real issue > is willingness to do the work. Why not work with all comers? If this new > platform is even vaguely interesting it would be very difficult to keep > hackerfolk from supplying it with a real OS for free, anyway. :-) I'd bet > that you could get a different OS port done per each prototype box that > you were willing to supply. This sounds very interesting. Let's do it. Just a couple of points: 1) I know of someone who has done a lot of work with SPIM on FreeBSD, including working on loading NetBSD COFF/ELF binaries (this work is incomplete). 2) The NetBSD VM model for MIPS and Alpha are quite similar; this is not the "unifications vs. non-unification", but is more related to TLB techniques and page management. 3) FreeBSD is less tolerant of cross-building than NetBSD is; on the other hand, FreeBSD has more people to throw at the project, I believe. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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