Date: Fri, 15 Dec 1995 17:12:17 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: hahaha@au-bon-pain.lcs.mit.edu Cc: terry@lambert.org, questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Does FreeBSD run on PowerPC platforms?t Message-ID: <199512160012.RAA05134@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <9512152246.AA15399@au-bon-pain.lcs.mit.edu> from "hahaha@au-bon-pain.lcs.mit.edu" at Dec 15, 95 05:46:53 pm
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> I saw on the PowerPC news letter quite a while ago, maybe even as long > as a year ago that some Japanese componay (my memory is suffering from > bit-rot; I seem to remember something like Cannon) has a PowerPC > machine, and has ported FreeBSD to it. The company is named JCC (Japan Computer Corporation). I communicated via email with Jim Salter of FirePower (who posts occasionally on the comp.sys.powerpc news group, who was claiming the JCC BSD4.4 port for their hardware (A box based on an OEM of the Motorolla Ultra board). Jim gave me a contact at JCC, who I subsequently contacted and asked if the code for the 4.4BSD-Lite port they did was based on any of the free source bases, and if there was intent to donate the code changes back to the BSD community (both to alleviate future reintegration costs and to offload some of their engineering burden and device driver support burden). Initial response from JCC's US representative was very positive, and he was just heading to Japan at the time and promised to raise the question with their corporate management. Lately all I've gotten in response to my queries is a form autoresponse, so I've tabled that and gone forward with my own code. > Incidentally, are you part of a serious effort at porting FreeBSD to > PowerPC platform(s)? Which one(s)? And how far along is the effort? I am seriously doing a port, though it has been suffering trying to rush on a PCI33 21064 based DEC Alpha port. That is no longer a problem, since the loaner equipment has been recalled by the sales department at the company (Jeffrey Hsu was the lead engineer; I was hacking, most recently, console code). I am using a Motorolla Ultra 603 board based machine. This is the same board as the FirePower systems and is the same one in several Motorolla PowerStack systems. I have an outstanding offer of discounted equipment from the Be, Inc. Developer program. I have email from Gassee stating that documentation for a port would be available. I just have to get back with how many machines I think the project will need... right now the count is "1". 8-). The current status of the port is that I've called up Arrow Electronics and ordered ~$220 of documentation out of my own pocket. They are verifying with Motorolla, and want to FAX me a "what will you do with this information form". This is alomost a NOP (a real waste), since the documentation for PPCBug is going to be obsolete some time soon (to be replaced by OpenFirmware). But I can't debug my paging until I debug my console, and I can't debug my console until I get the PPCBug documentation. Right now, I can use the AIX bootstrap to load a kernel and load a shell as init, but it blows up if I load init as init. Alan Briggs (from the NetBSD camp) has also expressed interest, as have one or two others (mainly on the new PCRP(?) Apple boxes). > Thanks for your time. :) That's fine. This is probably more information than you want to know anyway. 8-). 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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