On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Kjetil B. Thomassen wrote:

> I have an R140 and a couple of A310s lying around at home, and I intend to
> get one or more of these up and running NetBSD/arm26.

Hooray!

> I have an Ether3 with Access+, an Acorn AKA-32 SCSI card, and also an
> AKA-30 SCSI card that was included with the R140.

The Ether3 should work fine.  The SCSI cards are currently unsupported,
but making the arm32 driver work shouldn't be hard.

> All of my arm26 computers have 4 MB RAM, and some of them have an ARM3.
> They all have a backplane and, I think, MEMC1a. They are also equipped
> with RISC OS 3 v3.1x.

That should all work, but be aware that 4Mb isn't currently enough to run
NetBSD/arm26 for any amount of time.  Help with correcting this would be
welcome.

> My problem is that I have not been able to find an install kernel for
> arm26, and there also is no archive of this mailing list on the NetBSD
> mailing list archive for me to check into earlier emails.

<URL:http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-arm26/> works fine for me.  Your
message is at <URL:http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-arm26/2000/11/24/
0000.html>, which implies that new messages are being archived correctly
as well.

> I recently
> joined this list, and so far I haven't come across any information
> regarding install kernels.

The reason for this is simply that there aren't any yet.  I've been
spending most of my time on making the system work rather than making it
easy (or indeed possible) to install.

> If I could get at least one of the arm26 computers up and running NetBSD,
> I could have it compile continously over the network,

In four megabytes?  Given my experience of running gcc on an eight-meg
i386 box, I think you'll be lucky to get a kernel compiled in a week.

> hopefully being able
> to assist you in your progress in getting an official port, maybe even a
> 1.5 release.

There's no chance of actually releasing NetBSD 1.5 on arm26, since the
NetBSD 1.5 sources have only rudimentary arm26 support.  1.6 is a
possibility.

> Also, I can donate one of my A310s to the NetBSD project so that you can
> keep on testing on that platform as well.

If you can get it to Cambridge, that might be useful.  Since the A310
isn't too different from the A3000 and A440, though, having one isn't a
pre-requisite to supporting it.  If you want to work on NetBSD/arm26, I'd
prefer you to keep the machine yourself -- I've already got five or six
test systems.

> The last think I need to know is whether a type 0 (15 kHz) monitor will
> work, as that is what I intend to use for my R140.

Type 0 monitors work fine.  By default, NetBSD/arm26 uses an 8x8 font on
the console, which gives you 80x32 characters in mode 15.

> I am sorry that this email is so long, but I felt that now is a good time
> to enter the port-arm26 project and there are lots of issues.

That's fine, as long as you're willing to work to fix them.

> Are there any possibilities for cross-compiling an install kernel on one
> of my other NetBSD boxes?

Yes.  In pkgsrc there's a cross-armv2-netbsd package.  I do all my
compilations using that on a macppc box, so it should work tolerably.
You might like to look at <URL:http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-arm26/
2000/07/21/0002.html>, where I explain how my installation works.

> Is netbooting an option, mounting root on my NetBSD/sparc box?

Yep.  That's currently the only place I've mounted root from.  Actually
loading the kernel over the network is tricky -- I'd recommend loading it
from a hard disc for now.  Root on NFS can be arranged in much the same
way as for any other NetBSD system -- I use DHCP to configure the clients,
but RARP/bootparams should work as well.

-- 
Ben Harris                                                   <bjh21@netbsd.org>
Portmaster, NetBSD/arm26               <URL:http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/arm26/>