Hi Eric,
Lawrence - are you selling your board? I would like to work on it along with a friend. So would be interested in buying a board or two for now to give it a shot!
Well, she is my pride and joy. So no, the board isn’t for sale. But see below. :)
NetBSD on m68k hardware (with MMU and FPU xD) is a joy.
So I believe I have most if not all of the parts needed for another board. I certainly have boards spare (I got the standard 5 made up), FPGAs, and even a couple of spare 68030s.
I’d be willing to supply a made up and working board at zero cost besides shipping from here in the UK to whoever can help me get NetBSD booting on mine. I don’t believe it to be a great deal of work for someone familiar with NetBSD. But that’s not me. And the MAXI030 is not an exotic machine. The FPGA makes it interesting, sure. But it’s pretty straightforward. I believe it could be done “remotely” and you’d get a pretty fast turnaround with me testing things out most evenings if needed.
I’ll even throw in a 8MB SIMM. No graphics cards though only because of pressure on my time to build the board up. I can probably dig out most of the parts though.
For completeness the following works on Linux:
1. Booting, VM etc. Kernel is transferred via low level custom ethernet protocol from Linux PC.
2. UARTs with interrupts
3. Basic IDE. No DMA. hdparm reports about 1MB/sec. Uses the usual hack of 32 bit instructions for a bit more speed.
4. The RTL NIC works. 8 bit transfers.
5. I2C bus: RTC and temp sensor work well.
6. PS/2 port for mouse and keyboard. Linux seems to disable interrupts for long enough that a FIFO is required in the FPGA to avoid lossage. Hopefully NetBSD doesn’t do that.
7. Basic, and I mean basic, framebuffer support via my cyclone 2 gfx card. Had X “running” at one point.
I’m going to make it easy by saying anything at 5 and later is nice to have.
So, if anyone is interested then let me know. All the needed specs, part numbers etc, are on the GitHub, including the VHDL for the FPGA. Which will contain the all important memory map.
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FWIW the FPGA makes all kinds of other things that I’ve not looked at possible. I’m particularly interested in implementing a DMAC and a better DRAM controller. The would improve board speed quite a bit, especially the DMAC. A decent Unix running on the board would be a great motivator for me to start working on this project again. :)
Lawrence