NetBSD/ofppc: History
Contacting various PowerPC machine manufacturers, among them Motorola Computer Group and FirePower (sorry, out of business now) to get information on their PowerPC machines. Being redirected by FirePower to EMS group in London, but this contact wasn't very productive.
New contact to FirePower, this time to Yuri Tsuchitani. This contact worked much better. Beginning discussion with Yuri and the development staff at FirePower about getting technical information on their machines.
Ordered a FirePower MX4100/2.
At the same time started to setup a cross-development environment on a Sun SPARCstation.
Ability to boot and mount root/swap from disk.
New /dev/rtc device to read/write the real-time clock.
System runs multiuser, and has completely recompiled itself natively.
Booting via NFS supports directory hierarchies and symbolic links.
The bootcode supports booting from ISO9660 filesystems.
A generic NetBSD/powerpc kernel can be booted via NFS, from an FFS filesystem, or from an ISO9660 CD.
When getting a Bull Estrella (essentially a Motorola Ultra Board with 603) with OpenFirmware, it took two days to adapt the port to the new machine. Most of the work was the addition of the 603 software TLB reload (for which the example code in the 603 manual is quite buggy).
Imported the kernel part of the port into the official NetBSD source tree.
Unfortunately my development machine died. Since FirePower, after being bought out by Motorola, no longer is in the business of supporting their old machines, I'm stuck. This is the main reason (apart from lack of time) that further development of NetBSD/powerpc is only crawling.
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