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Date:      Wed, 13 Aug 2003 21:03:32 +1000
From:      Peter Grehan <grehan@freebsd.org>
To:        Morton Lin <mtlin1@ms36.hinet.net>
Cc:        freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Porting FreeBSD to PowerPC 860 ?
Message-ID:  <3F3A1B04.97E86EC0@freebsd.org>
References:  <01ac01c36171$28ade6b0$0655608c@mtlin>

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Hi Morton

> I had an EmbeddedPlanet PowerPC 860 evaluation board and ICE device.
> (EmbeddedPlanet SBC 860 H EP862-1.1 and BDI 2000)
 ...
> I want to know does anyone work on it already ? And what's
> information and knowledge I should to learn and dig ? Is there
> any code base already I can develop depend on it ? I think the
> problem is I am not very familiar with FreeBSD kernel hacking.

 The 860 is quite different than the G3/G4 processors currently supported
by the port

 - no BAT registers
 - the MMU is a simple TLB, unlike the OEA h/w tablewalk in the G3/G4
 - no floating point
 - a huge amount of system-on-chip logic and peripherals

 It will be quite a lot of work to get FreeBSD running on an 860, but I have one,
and it is my long term goal. I greatly encourage you to join in the fun :-)

 The NetBSD port to the IBM 4xx is a good place to start: the 4xx is similar to the
860 in that there is only a TLB for addr translation, and it has no floating point.
A lot of device driver work needs to be done to support the inbuilt peripherals.

 Also, the current port is closely tied to OpenFirmware - that has to be split out,
and you have to find a way to get the loader to run. I'm not sure what ROM monitor
the EmbeddedPlanet boards have, but if it's U-Boot, then there is a bit of work
to be done to interface FreeBSD's loader to it.

later,

Peter.



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