On Mon, 9 Dec 1996, Tom Rini wrote:

> >1.	Is anyone working on/planning to work on a port of NetBSD to
> >Mach3?
> 
> Not that i know of, but i've talked to nick stephens about this before,
> and he said that porting it over would have been easier then linux (still
> a whole lota fun though)

Well, since the Mach Microkernel is evidently based on a code base similar
to the BSD's, that could make things easier.

> >2.	Are the hardware-dependant sections of NetBSD's code essentially
> >all in one section, or are there a number of #ifdefs scattered throughout
> >the code?
> 
> You'd need to make its own arch of course,  but some of it should work
> form the arch/mac68k, and other bits from arch/powerpc (pci only).

That was what I was thinking, especially some of the stuff that's a pain
to write....  Like the Assembly Language code.  :-)

Speaking of the powerpc port... is that... mature yet?  Does it run on
7600's?  If so, I may not bother with MkLinux (I've always found the
NetBSD look-and-feel to be more pleasant somehow).

> >And yes, I'm looking at the NetBSD sources right now.  I've kinda come to
> >the conclusion that the biggest pains would be in finding a way to start
> >it from mach, and in finding a way to beta test without a second booting
> >MkLinux partition.  That and pounding the Linux ext2fs code in for obvious
> >reasons.
> 
> Well, you don't need a second booting partition to use the multi-server
> part of mach.  You can run it off a zip untill it out grow that.  Just

Right.  EZ135.  Same dif.

> need to find an fs that both linux and netbsd can read.  You may also
> wanto look though the mklinux src, and join
> mklinux-developer-system@mklinux.apple.com.  I remeber someone asking
> about doing something like this to FreeBSD before, and I took a quick stab
> at Lites (don't know much C, so it died fast)

Somehow, I suspect the lites port would serve as a very good code base for
porting, considering they're derived from the same initial source base.
That could cut coding down drastically... maybe...

Thanks for the ideas,

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