Re: NetBSD ported to MPC860 / MPC8260? (fwd)

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

        Anyone interested may want to join the fun on tech-kern.


                David/absolute

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 17:51:14 -0800 (PST)
From: David Querbach <querbach%realtime.bc.ca@localhost>
To: tech-kern%netbsd.org@localhost
Subject: Re: NetBSD ported to MPC860 / MPC8260?


In regard to:

> > > Has NetBSD been ported to Motorola MPC860 or MPC8260 PowerPC architecture?
> > 
> > ... or the MPC821/823, and especially the MBX860 and MBX821 development
> > boards from Motorola?  (I was just about to ask the same question myself.)
> 

Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

> Hm.  Aren't the 860/8260 the parts with the onboard quad sync seial logic,
> the "PowerQUICC" or some such?  

Indeed they are.  There are about a dozen different chips in the familiy,
with different on-chip peripherals and serial port capabilities.  In the
family, you can find just about any serial protocol I've ever heard of
(including 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s Ethernet).  Some chips (the MPC821 and MPC823)
even have LCD controllers.

Being targeted at the embedded world, however, they don't have hardware
floating point or the large-block memory mapper (I forget what this is
called, exactly).  They do, however, have some cache and the small-block (4k
byte) MMU with a TLB.

> I'd be interested in hacking on a port to these, though I no longer have a
> commercial reason to do so (at one point I was working on an embedded
> device that seemed likely to have one of these as the CPU, and I still
> have a bunch of manuals at home somewhere I think).

Manuals can be had free from the Motorola website:  www.mot-sps.com.  You
fill out a web form, and they mail them to you.

and Jukka Marin wrote:

> I _may_ (don't know yet) be sub-contracted to help in a project based on
> MPC860/MPC8260.  Everything's unknown at this point - it's not even known
> what OS will be selected - I hope it will be one of the BSD's (not linux).
> If this project is started and _if_ I get into it, I'd be interested in
> everything you do. ;-)

> Do you have any idea of the time line - do you need the porting job be
> done within a few months, for example?  I'm sure I'll have no time for
> this in January, probably not in February, either.  (Old projects taking
> up all the time..)

I'm not in any particular hurry; we're just acquiring a new technologies
(MCP8xx and embedded Un*x) that we think may come in handy.  We've had a
couple of jobs recently that might have been simpler with MPC8xx/Un*x, so
we'd like to be ready for the next one.

I look forward to working with both of you.

Regards,

David Querbach
Real-Time Systems Inc.

P.S.  Neither of your responses came through the list server.  Is this as
expected, or should the server be adding a return-path field to the header? 
I'm no expert in email, so I hesitate to roust the list manager myself.