RE: Pegasos port status

["Matt Sealey" <matt%genesi-usa.com@localhost>]

Mrf, the usual mailing-list name mixup. It was Jorge just now but I really
remember this same discussion in the past (maybe it was an Adrian or an Alan..)
who wanted the source code to the firmware before he would even consider a
NetBSD port to be feasible :)

You hit my radar because you asked about MPP pin configurations, which was
something we ran into with other OS port guys. Really like I explained it is
down to the usual ports onto these kinds of systems being "nothing but
NetBSD" and not having a firmware behind it that sets things up. The Linux
Discovery platform support (written by guys at MontaVista etc.) comes from
this concept too, that there needs to be full chipset documentation and a
lot of example source to even think about it. With our firmware, all you
need to look at is the peripherals.

Sorry for the mis-name mis-understanding :)

(why are we doing CC-mess with this when it could just go to the mailing
lists? I hate Majordomo and Mailman and the way it rewrites your headers..)

On a lighter note, we do have an updated firmware that if people want to
get a head-start on NetBSD right now, we can provide. It may have some
bugs (certainly the ones Jorge just mentioned! :) but they should not
prove to hinder progress of the port. Checking out the NetBSD port as it
got to with the 2.0 tree, it uses block-level OF disk access with a
native filesystem, which nicely works around the fact that we don't have
native UFS/UFS2 support in the firmware. However this is coming (a side
effect of wanting to boot Solaris natively) anyway.

Who wants it? Mail me privately and we'll sort it out. I will need your
current board revision and serial number since I need to provide the
original firmware so you can downgrade if you hit trouble. The old
firmware flash program does not understand the difference between some
of the board revisions and will just throw an incompatible HAL into
the flash (basic symptom; your system will run 10x faster, but time
will run backwards, the dead will start rising from the grave, dogs
and cats start living together, and your CPU will slowly burn to a
crisp.. we don't want that)

-- 
Matt Sealey <matt%genesi-usa.com@localhost>
Manager, Genesi, Developer Relations


 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Allen Briggs [mailto:briggs%netbsd.org@localhost] 
> Sent: Monday, July 17, 2006 6:45 AM
> To: Matt Sealey
> Cc: 'Jorge Acereda Maci?'; 'Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck'; 
> 'DataZap'; 'Tim Rightnour'; port-powerpc%netbsd.org@localhost; 
> netbsd-ports%netbsd.org@localhost; port-ofppc%netbsd.org@localhost
> Subject: Re: Pegasos port status
> 
> On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 04:09:45AM -0500, Matt Sealey wrote:
> > hope of it ever working, and the only solution is to Open 
> Source it as 
> > Allen wants?
> 
> Umm..  Do you mean me?  I don't recall asking for that.  As 
> long as it works well enough, I don't have a problem with it 
> being closed source.  And I pointed out that it worked well 
> enough for both MorphOS and for Linux on the Pegasos II that 
> I have here.  I know Jorge and others have run into OFW bugs, 
> but I don't know the details or why they were show-stoppers.
> 
> If you meant someone else, sorry for the noise.
> 
> -allen
> 
> -- 
>                   Use NetBSD!  http://www.NetBSD.org/
>