Douglas Wade Needham writes:
- Quoting Giles Lean (giles@nemeton.com.au):
- > > I know there is work on a HP9000/700 port, and I can't believe they
- > > are that drastically different that a port can't be dragged out of
- > > it.
- > 
- > You underestimate HP's inventiveness. :-)
- > 
- > The main challenge to a 800 port is the different busses that have
- > been used over the years; documentation is not publicly available for
- > some of these, including the HP-PB bus used by the G70 Peter Eisch
- > mentioned.

	Actually, a number of the late model 800 series machines
look a lot like the late model 700 series machines.. The known
exceptions are the V-class, and perhaps the SuperDome.

- > I recommend that anyone who is interested in a PA-RISC port start by
- > looking at the documentation that has been released by HP for the
- > PA-RISC Linux port.  There's a good overview of which machines are
- > targetted for support:
- 
- Quite true.  I have a ancient (5yr old) 9000/F10, which is
- unfortunately an 817 (IIRC) CPU.  While I would keep 10.20 on it as a
- secondary boot, I too would love to get NetBSD on it.  However, near
- as I can tell, HP has yet to release the information on the bus and
- from what I hear probably has no intention to do so due to the immense
- amounts of propritary and NDA information in what internal docs they
- can still find.  From what I can tell, here are the critical docs we
- are still missing (at least as of a few months ago) for just the
- simple F10:
- 
-     - CPU bus
-     - Backplane bus
-     - I/O module (which includes the console, SCSI and ethernet)

	Yup..  The basic backplane information on many of the
older server class (800 series) systems is non-existant (even
within HP, it seems) or unreleasable..

- The one thing I do have information on is their boot loader format,
- for which I had written a program which understood about 80% of the
- information on my HD and 10.20 install CD-ROM.  However, when I
- started working at my current employer (a large firm recently in the
- news), I stopped working on this lest it get tagged as IP.

	Would you care to share the program sources??  And the
information sources used to write the program?? (I suspect I
already have them, or pointers, but it doesn't hurt to have more
information.. :-)  

	I really need to spend some time on the hppa port! (I
don't know how Jason gets so much done!  Work, Life, and I run
out before NetBSD gets its slice!)

--
Eric Schnoebelen		eric@cirr.com		http://www.cirr.com
	"It's kind of fun to do the impossible." -- Walt Disney