Re: (offtopic and quite possibly silly) BeBox architecture, next generation

[Allen Briggs <briggs%wasabisystems.com@localhost>]

What Scott said...

> From what I've seen, the BeBox design seems to be "somewhat" 
> documented, as opposed to "well" documented.

Yes.  The information that's out there is quite decent, really.
However, some things like _an actual memory & I/O map_ would be
really nice...  :-)  Right now, we know what hardware is there,
more or less, but we don't know where to find much of it (i.e.,
any but the ones that are currently supported).  The OS Writer's
Cookbook, for example, gives us a little bit of the memory map,
but says,

        "The standard ISA hardware device registers are at the
         standard offsets within the ISA I/O space.  The keyboard
         is at 0x80000060 and 0x80000064, SERIAL 1 is at 0x800003F8-
         0x800003FF, etc.  The Be-specific ISA hardware (sound,
         GeekPort(TM), infrared, extra serial ports) are also in
         ISA space.  Describing their hardware interface is a future
         newsletter topic."

Except they never got to it, apparently.  :-(

> I don't how well SMP is supported in NetBSD-BeBox

It's not yet.  MP work is really just getting underway in NetBSD
at the moment.  That's one of the things that I want to work on,
though, since we do know enough, I think, to get it up and running
on the BeBox.

As Scott says, though, the hardware configuration of the BeBox is
pretty limited.  A modern design could probably do much better, but
it might still not be real cheap.

The Be interrupt controller, BTW, is limited to 2 processors.  A modern
design would probably use an OpenPIC of some sort (as Apple does, and
as some PReP-ish hardware does).

In any case, this is off-topic for this list.  There are a couple of
places on the net where you could talk about this if you wanted to.
If someone builds a slick PPC box, I'll be happy to work on NetBSD
for it.  :-)

Keep in mind that IBM's POP and a number of "OpenPPC" (search for this
on the net, if you're interested) projects never got off the ground
(for various reasons).

-allen

-- 
 Allen Briggs                     briggs%wasabisystems.com@localhost
 http://www.wasabisystems.com/    Quality NetBSD CDs, Sales, Support, Service