Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 11:20:46 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: kegrotla@korrnet.org (Kjell E Grotland) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: IBM 57SLC Message-ID: <199611261820.LAA25347@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.961125195120.29361A-100000@clarion.korrnet.org> from "Kjell E Grotland" at Nov 25, 96 07:54:12 pm
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> Oh by the way i have heard a rumour that MAC PowerPCs will support > FreeBSD. Any truth to this. That would be just totally awsome. Running > FreeBSD on a RISC chip machine. Depends. Will they ever be as documented as the Motorolla Ultra 603/604 motherboards Soled by FirePower systems, Arrow Electronics, and used in Motorolla PowerStack systems? I have been unable to get my hands on the touted-for-Linux OSF/Mach hardware interface so far, which is supposedly the only publically available "documentation". Even so, the hardware it applies to is the new Mac's, *NOT* the 6100, 7100, 8100 NuBus systems. So if you can buy it used for a resonable price, it won't run (ever) unless Apple documents it. There is some indication from the NetBSD camp that the Mach code is (like the Tennon Systems MACH-10) running through the ROM's. This means that the drivers are single threaded, non-reentrant, and a huge bottleneck to multiprocessing (hey! Just like running MacOS on top of those same ROM's!). I know I've been arguing for BIOS-based fallback drivers for PC's for forever, but they are not something on which one could safely base an entire port (yes, I know the 1.1.5 PS/2 port which was never released used ABIOS calls; ABIOS is not BIOS is not Mac ROM's). Most likely I will be hacking on a BeBox after the SMP stuff is committed and the Intel MP spec is abstracted under a HAL used by the kernel (surprisingly, PPC based machines don't follow the Intel MP spec... go figure 8-)). 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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