Reinhold Huber writes:
- Reading various mails on this list, I think there definitly is
- interest in porting NetBSD (or s.th. similar) to PA-RISC machines.
- There are (at least) two people here in Munich. However, anybody
- who stated interest said that he (she?) lacked skill to start the
- porting project.
- 
- So I think we need someone with enough knowledge of the kernel to
- tell the others where to start, so that the others have a chance
- to learn what must be done to get the port running.

	I've enough process knowledge to sugguest directions,
but still lack enough hardware knowledge to sugguest anything
definiative.. :-/

	There are really two things that need to be done.
		1) Building a kernel.
		2) Building the runtime environment.

	At the moment, OpenBSD has the most HPPA bits in the
tree, so it is a natural starting point for the kernel. Having
choosen the kernel to build, someone really needs to take a look
at porting libc and friends to the HPPA processor architecture.
Using a cross compiler (there are instructions for generating a
cross compiler on the OpenBSD web pages) it shouldn't be too
hard.  Determining of machine dependent routines need to be
incorporated into libc, and generating those routines would be
the biggest effort.

	Hopefully, this might mean that a kernel and userland
might become available about the same time.. (if the kernel can
boot, and has an NFS root to mount, with binaries, that would be
wonderful!.)

- I think it is worth a try to start porting, so I hope there will
- be someone who gets things started.

	If anyone is wanting to help/work in the kernel, a good
starting point would be reading the kernel style guide out of
the source tree, and then tracking down as much information as
you can find on how _one_ model workstation boots. (I'm going to
be wacking on the 720 in a week or so..)  Once you've got the
information, build a cross compile tree (on a _fast_ machine)
and start trying to make things netboot..

	Ok, I've nattered enough, time to put my money where my
mouth is.. :-)

--
Eric Schnoebelen		eric@cirr.com		http://www.cirr.com
    At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial 
		challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
					  -- Washington Post Magazine,6/9/85