Subject: Followup on red herrings
To: None <tech-ports@netbsd.org>
From: Peter Seebach <seebs@plethora.net>
List: tech-ports
Date: 02/19/2006 07:04:28
Today's lesson is, READ THE FINE PRINT.

It turns out that, for all my efforts to get away from the openbios code,
in fact, the RedBoot code sets the board up in PRECISELY the same way that
openbios does, because all the Linuxy people decided to just use that memory
layout.  I discovered this when I noticed that the TAMS and Walnut ports of
Linux shared all of this code.

So, about two thirds of my "porting effort" was a PURE RED HERRING.

That doesn't mean I can make the 83816 work, but it does mean that everything
else will work in a clean and elegant way that does not require me to
interact with the eeprom at all; indeed, all my efforts to drive the eeprom
chip were rather missing the point, which is that the processor can just
read that memory anyway.

*sigh*  I have got to stop trying to do serious work when I'm too tired.

-s