Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 20:05:42 -0400 From: Christopher A Shepherd <cshepher@linux-florida.com> To: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD-ppc ideas Message-ID: <200005310005.e4V05gM17560@intel.linux-florida.com>
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Hiyas, Haven't seen a lot of traffic on this list, but I'd like to add support to the idea of porting FreeBSD over to the powerpc. To this end, a lot of work has already been done for us (yes I know, we don't just want to recycle code), specifically.. - NetBSD has done the bootstrap, walking up the OF device tree and discovering hardware on it, as has LinuxPPC. I don't think NetBSD has the Uni-North bridge support that LinuxPPC has, however. But I think Grackle and Uni-North are the only ones we're looking to support. - NetBSD and OpenBSD, as far as I know, rely on Open Firmware to do the keyboard and display I/O, which probably isn't what we want. But perhaps it is, and X should be left up to XFree86 servers (which, I believe, now support the ATI chipsets). I use NetBSD as the example here, because (and I'm guessing here) I believe it uses the proper calling interface for functions (passing values in the proper registers, setting up the stack frame properly, etc), whereas I believe OpenBSD has adopted AIX's ABI. So the first step is to import NetBSD's ppc/ directory into the tree and let it run on the Open Firmware drivers until we get it fitting seamlessly with the rest of FreeBSD. Since I really don't know what I'm talking about yet with regard to FreeBSD's console drivers, I wouldn't know if we have to write any USB (probably not?) or ATI drivers. Has anyone started on this? I'm downloading the netbsd and freebsd trees right now to see what's required on this step. My familiarity with the trees is pretty low (I've used LinuxPPC thusfar), so I might be attempting something idiotic. -Chris To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ppc" in the body of the message
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