Hi,
It worked at one point but the code seems to be bit-rotted; I had to fix problems in two files just to get a G5 kernel to compile. I managed to get to an ofwboot prompt, but it kept complaining about an (unspecified) I/O error trying to read the kernel off the HFS disk. I left it at that point; I'll next try to boot it diskless when I have some time to spend on it.
I hope to spend some time on this soon. Since Final Chop 7 is Intel only, I have a few extra G5s which would undoubtedly perform very well with NetBSD if performance on a G4 is a good gauge.
I really want a 64 bit kernel for this machine; I have a small collection of G5's and a project that gets significant benefit from 64 bit loads. That, however, requires a big block of time to work on.
When you get to the point of having test kernels, I'd be more than happy to help where I can.
I don't think anyone could be running this code at all (in a recent kernel) since if they were I'd expect not to get compilation errors when trying to build a -current kernel. I don't know about missing hardware support (I can't see any indication that the G5's disk controller is missing support, for what that's worth), but its current problems are more fundamental than that in any case.
I seem to remember something about the built-on SATA not being supported, but it's hardly a big issue; you can use a drive on the SATA to boot the kernel, then use a drive on a supported bus as your root filesystem. This is what we need to do for, say, original iMacs and Amigas so that the kernel doesn't end up after the first 8 gigs or if the kernel is on the IDE bus but our main storage is on SCSI.
On the other hand, so many SATA chips are supported these days that I can't imagine some code for it not being in the tree.
I'll start playing after I get back from Interop. NetBSD running on a dual processor Xserve G5 with 8 gigs would be very nice.
John