Date: Fri, 03 Sep 1999 14:43:57 +0200 From: Gerald Heinig <gh046171@post.rwth-aachen.de> To: BSD Bob <bsdbob@weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu> Cc: freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Status of FBSD sparc porting? Message-ID: <37CFC28D.7063AF7A@post.rwth-aachen.de> References: <199909012314.TAA11490@weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu>
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BSD Bob wrote: > Hello.... > > I have been running FBSD for about 5 years, and am relatively comfortable > with it on x86 machines. But, I also run several sparcs of various > flavors, at home. What is the status of the FBSD Sparc port? Bob, The FreeBSD Sparc mailing list has been a bit quiet recently - people on holiday or too busy etc. I can only really speak for myself here, since I'm not in regular contact with anyone else on this list, but it seems that most people (me included) are still getting clued up ie. looking for doco. I've read a lot of the "The design and implementation of the 4.4BSD lite operating system" book and have got hold of the Sparc hardware manual plus other docs from Sun about writing device drivers which contain hardware details. By the way, I'm talking about the Sparc32 port, NOT Ultrasparc! What would help me (and maybe others on the list) is an answer to the following questions: 1) Is it better/more sensible to use the NetBSD code or even Linux stuff to find out how to do things or is it better to get your own docs and solve the problem yourself? Personally, I'd much prefer to "roll our own", although it's probably far more work and considerably more difficult. However, we'd all learn more that way. Anyone have any ideas on this? 2) Anyone have a copy of the IEEE 1275 OpenBoot standard document? What bugs me personally is: how, *exactly*, does the device tree as created by the Boot Prom get passed to the program that's being booted. Another one is: how do I output characters to the console or read input characters from the keyboard via the PROM? Does it use function calls (if so, what addresses/arguments) or interrupts (interrupt no./calling convention)? and so on.. 3) Is there a rough overview of what happens and where, when the FreeBSD kernel starts up? I'm looking for something like the description of the Minix source code in Andrew Tanenbaum's "Operating systems: design and implementation". The book by Karels/McKusick/Bostic/Quarterman is too high-level (ie. not enough detail) and the source code is too much detail. Does something like this exist? I tried installing NetBSD 1.4 on my SS10 but that gave no joy and I was told that 1.4.1 would fix the problem. I haven't had time to give it a try yet. That's the status as I see it. Cheers, Gerald To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-sparc" in the body of the message
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