On Monday 26 February 2001  3:29 pm, Rob Dimond wrote:
> Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> > > AFAIK they were there to support hydra or the i486 copro ... but i
> > > agree that if they aren't used then they might as well be discarded...
> > > If there ever is a need for them we can allways create them anew...

I think they were for both, however /dev/cpu0 and 1 would make more sense as 
being the x86 copro.

> > I've always wanted to write a driver that would support the x86 card in
> > the RPC.  I have one and most of the time it just sits there doing
> > nothing.  The simplest way would be to lock down a region of physical
> > memory that would be owned by the x86 and then create a pseudo network
> > device that allowed the two "hosts" to communicate.  Unfortunately, I was
> > unable to obtain sufficient information on the Gemini ASIC on the card to
> > work out how to communicate with the processor.
> >
> > Anyone know if this information was ever made public?
> >
> > R.
>
> There was a recent discussion about this on one of the comp.sys.acorn
> groups.
> Apparently the details of the ASIC are still under NDA which I guess
> virtually rules out any open-source software using it.

As aleph one now do linux, I wonder if this will change.  Certainly the first 
unix running on a risc-pc was actually linux running on the 486 card (it was 
what mark originally started with)

Anyone know why mark originally chose NetBSD over the other free unices?

Cheers,
Chris