Re: PowerPC 970 (G5) 64-bit support

[Dennis Ferguson <dennis.c.ferguson%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 11 Apr 2011, at 13:38 , Erik Fair wrote:
> How far along is NetBSD/macppc towards supporting the PowerPC 970 (G5) 
> properly in 64-bit mode?

Not very.  I once (maybe a year or two ago) went through
the exercise of cleaning up and send-pr'ing all the trivial
things which prevented a build for the target from completing,
but that left two very non-trivial issues: the ELF dynamic
loader has no support for the target and the kernel is missing
machine dependent code (64 bit memory management is significantly
different than the 32 bit code).  It was possible to compile a
kernel for the G5 in 32 bit bridge mode, but the last couple of
times I tried that recently suggests this has bit-rotted in the
intervening period as well.

I once thought I might try to take this on, but it turned
out I had to work for a living instead.  I would really,
really like to have a 64-bit kernel for that machine.

Dennis Ferguson