Re: I should like...

["David A. Gatwood" <marsmail%globegate.utm.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Ken Nakata wrote:

> On Mon, 2 Nov 1998 23:22:17 +0100, Fabrizio Catalano wrote:
> 
> > My English is basic (auto didact) and I've some difficult to understand
> > the understoods and implied meanings so widely used in mail messages.
> > I'm a 38 years old man graduate as software analyst, but more than 20 years
> > ago! FORTRAN, COBOL and PL1 on an Honeywell G118 (32k RAM) was my starting
> > point. I like Macs, and now, as employee, I use MacOs, Windows and Solaris
> > boxes at job and I've succesfully set up a NetBSD (Quadra 700) as IP-NAT,
> > netatalk and Samba server with the help of port-mac68k mailing list.
> > Now the subject is that I should like to do some job to port NetBSD to
> > PowerPC Macintoshes near the end of life (6100-7100-8100); I've one at home
> > (8100/100) and a lot of them at job. I need help about how to begin (what
> > to read, what to do and so on...).

One thing to look into... the x100's don't have OpenFirmware, so last I
checked, they can't boot the macppc port of NetBSD.  You might start by
trying to figure out how to add a second entry point into the kernel to
allow for booting through BootX (this is an extension that allows booting
several OSes at startup time, much like the MkLinux booter, except this
one's open source :-).

Something else to note....  The 601's idea of uptime is different from the
other processors, and the x100's in particular.  The x100's don't quite
tick at nsec precision (see MkLinux's sources for info), so you'll have to
make some adjustments there.  I'm not sure about other processor
differences.  The big difference, obviously, will be the need for
additional drivers.  The SCSI will probably only need some changes to the
base address, as it's still a 53C94.  The video... will probably need a
completely new driver, unless there's a dummy driver that's pretty
generic, in which you might be able to hack in the appropriate base
address and get pretty lousy support.  YMMV.  The serial support is a bit
different, though I'm not sure how significantly.  Regardless, again, a
good place to look is the MkLinux source, which is fairly robust on the
x100's (as of a few weeks ago...).  For current sources on that, you
should pull the sources from globegate's cvs server.  The cvs account name
is public, with a password of mklinux (and no, there's no associated
system account, so don't even try telnetting in).


Later,
David

David A. Gatwood                         Visit globegate's internet
dgatwood%globegate.utm.edu@localhost                  talker, Deep Space 36
http://globegate.utm.edu                telnet globegate.utm.edu:9624

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